


TO HOLD BACK THE SKY

by Mikkeneko



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, FenHanders IN SPAAAAACE, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Abuse, Polyamory, Psionics, Sleep Deprivation, Space Spiders, and not to the main three, and null-g sex, and raygun fights, dashing space adventures, either way: arachnophobia warning, fun times, mages are espers, occupational drug use, the character death tag won't apply till later, there will be space chases, well more like eldritch space abominations that are vaguely spider-shaped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-07-24 07:09:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 55,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7498884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Garrett Hawke is a deep-space salvager and ship's captain, gallivanting about the galaxy with his two boyfriends, Anders and Fenris. But when they take on a salvage job that's more than it seems to be, their comfortable universe is about to get turned upside-down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Kirkwall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fenhanders In Space is a go! Hope you guys enjoy it.
> 
> Stealing a lot of worldbuilding details from Mass Effect, but the best thing about creating my own setting is that I get to make stuff up! Oh boy! Expect a lot more exposition about espers, Fade travel, elves, dark matter aberrations, the Andrastean Federation and much more in the chapters to come.

 Hawke drifted awake. For the first few fuzzy moments, he wasn't sure what had wakened him; he was warm, utterly relaxed, immersed in the comfort of his own cabin with the sounds of familiar and beloved breathing just out-of-synch with his. There were no alarms, no strident beeping or flashing lights to disturb his hazy contentment, so Hawke nestled back down into the blankets and pillows to return to sleep and peace. 

His hand met empty air instead of blanket, and his head bobbed in empty space, finding no pillows. He jolted further into wakefulness, head jerking up and blinking into the dim cabin lights. That was what had woken him; he was _drifting,_ hovering inches away from his oh-so-comfy berth. 

The cabin was lit only by the dim LED of the clock faces, just enough to throw red shadows at oddly skewed angles to the limbs and bodies of the sleepers there. Hawke fumbled for the light switch, missed it, and cursed in frustration. "Fenris," he said aloud, instead. "Fenris, wake up." 

Fenris at least was easy to find in a dark room; his pure-white hair glowed red in the light. _He_ at least still had a pillow clutched in his hands, and part of a blanket wrapped around his legs. Hawke reached over to grasp his shoulder, shaking him. "Fenris, the gravity's gone out again," he said. "Can you go and fix it?" 

"Fuck off," the elf said distinctly, before rolling over to turn his back to Hawke and bury his face in the pillow. "Sleeping." 

In null-g, every action had an equal and opposite reaction; Hawke drifted backwards until he bumped against a warm, solid body, wedged between the mattress and the padded cabin wall. Anders -- by process of elimination, it pretty much had to be Anders -- stirred for a moment, making muddled query noises, then lapsed back into sleep. And promptly began snoring like a combustion motor. 

Hawke sighed. "Fenris, you gotta fix the gravity," he pleaded. There was no chance now of getting back to sleep, now that Anders had started snoring. Null-g always had that effect on the man, stuffed up his sinuses and blocked his prodigious nose. "Anders won't be quiet until you do." 

"Put him out the airlock and we'll have peace and quiet," Fenris muttered. He never did like being woken early. 

"Shove _you_ out the airlock, more like," Anders replied crankily. As if suiting words to action, he set his shoulder against Hawke's chest and pushed. 

As Anders had the better bracing, Hawke perforce moved; he flailed for a handhold and barely managed to careen to a stop before he bowled Fenris over mid-air. Which, no doubt, had been Anders' intention. "Nobody's getting shoved out any airlocks, okay?" Hawke yelped, now thoroughly awake. "Come on, it's time to get up anyway, it's morning." 

"No morning in deep space," Anders murmured, eyes still closed. 

"No _sun_ in deep space," Fenris added, face still buried against the pillow. 

Hawke sighed. "No, but there _is_  morning on Kirkwall Station," he said. "And we're supposed to rendezvous with that..." He peered at the red readouts of the clock for a moment, before giving up; it was far too early in the morning to try to convert from station standard time to whatever the local solar calendar was. "Today. Sometime today." 

Fenris ignored him, only the slightest twitch of his ears betraying that he'd heard at all. Hawke sighed, floating closer to the white-haired elf. "Please, Fenris?" he begged. "Fix the gravity? Nobody else knows the ship's machinery better than you, after all." 

"Flattery will get you nowhere," Fenris grunted against the pillow. "Go away." 

Instead, he drifted the last few inches until his body brushed against the elf's, close enough to reach out and caress the skin on the back of Fenris' neck, breathe hot kisses against the tips of his ears. "Pretty, pretty please?" he wheedled. He kissed his way down the ear, flicking his tongue against the sensitive spot under the earlobe and continuing to kiss down the side of his neck. "I'll make it up to you tonight, I promise." 

Fenris let out a loud, long groan, then followed it with a stream of vile curses in Tevene. He punched the pillow once, then flung it away from him with a snarl. Being on a tether, it didn't actually go very far before being slowed to a drifting crawl like the rest of them. "Fine!" Fenris growled. "But you owe me one, Hawke." 

He turned in mid-air, angular momentum giving him the push that he needed to drift over to the cabin wall. With one smooth motion, he took hold of a handheld and punched the door control, sailing through gracefully. Now that he had given in to being awake, Fenris' movements were, as always, a breathtaking combination of athleticism and grace. Hawke, who always felt a little bit like a beached seal in zero-g no matter how many years he spent in space, watched him go wistfully. 

The door sealed behind him, leaving Hawke and Anders drifting quietly in the cabin. Even without a third body helping to heat it, the room was still blissfully warm, dim-lit and full of languid ease. Drifting weightlessly, Hawke felt sleep pulling at him again, and struggled to resist it. 

Anders' snoring did help rather with that particular task. With a sigh, Hawke began the ungainly motions needed to get his stranded self over to a nearby wall. The nearest handhold turned out to be Anders, who snorted himself awake as Hawke grabbed onto his leg and clung to him. 

"Whuzzat, love?" Anders said sleepily, his hands groping through the air for Hawke. Hawke couldn't help but smile at the sight he made; silky blond hair drifting in a corona around his face, long skinny limbs sprawled everywhere, sloppy sleepwear printed with the kittens that Anders loved so dearly. He reached up to capture Anders' hand, twining it his own, and reeled him in for a kiss. 

Anders responded to his kiss languidly, only half-awake, and for a long time they just drifted together, wrapped in each others' arms in the dim and quiet. Anders made breathy, soft, half-awake noises against his mouth, and though his eyes stayed closed, his hands didn't seem to need the guidance as they swept across Hawke's skin.

Gradually the kisses began to deepen, Anders sucking hungrily at Hawke's lower lip and tongue like he was trying to pull Hawke into himself. His hands wandered, roaming up and down Hawke's back before sliding under the waistband of his sleep pants to grip firmly and possessively at Hawke's ass. 

Hawke moaned into Anders' mouth, and pulled himself free of the kiss with a wet pop. "We shouldn't," he groaned, even as his own hands ran down Anders' belly, scraping through the treasure trail of hair to slide under the edge of his boxers. "After rousting him out of bed, Fenris will never forgive us if we don't get up too…" 

Anders' response was garbled, busy tonguing his way down Hawke's throat to his chest, but Hawke thought he heard something to the effect of "Fuck Fenris." That was certainly a prospect Hawke would be interested in, but he hadn't been lying; they _really_ had to get ready to dock in Kirkwall. There would be plenty of time to lie around the ship and fool around when they were en route; but for now, this was a working ship and he was a working man. Business came first.

Even if it was hard to remember that when Anders had his skin in his mouth, applying just enough teeth and suction to make Hawke see stars.

There wasn't much warning, only a minute change in the subtle vibration of the ship -- almost as though something further into the ship was grinding against itself -- but it was familiar enough to make Hawke startle, put his hands on Anders' shoulder and shove him back a precious few inches. 

Then the gravity came back on, and dumped them both against the nearest wall. 

"Fuck!" Anders cursed, hands flying to his head where he'd thumped it against a wall panel. Thankfully, most of the interior of the cabin was padded; Hawke only had the breath knocked out of him when he'd landed awkwardly on his side. The vision of what might have happened if Anders had still had sensitive parts of his anatomy between his teeth danced vividly in his mind, and the relief of it made Hawke start to laugh. 

Anders glowered at him. "It's not funny," he grumbled. "He did that on purpose." 

"He did not," Hawke chuckled, rolling over onto his back and staring up at the ceiling (now that there _was_ a ceiling again.) "I asked him to fix the gravity, and he did. He couldn't even have known what we were doing in here." 

"Oh, he has his ways," Anders huffed, crab-walking over to the nearest storage locker that held his clothes. "He hates having to share you with me. He was probably spying on us with the ship's cameras." 

"You know only superadmins have access to that video feed, love," Hawke reminded him. "And you know that's not what Fenris thinks. Toss me a suit, will you?" 

Anders lobbed a jumpsuit in his direction, saving him the trouble of having to dig one out, and the two men got dressed in the now not-so-enticing confines of the sleeping cabin. Morning, like it or not, was here to stay.

 

* * *

 

Cooking on a spaceship usually meant combining nutrient base with one of the store of flavor and/or texture additives they kept packed into dense bricks in the cabinets. It was more art than science; of course there were recipes and walkthroughs everywhere, but none of them ever seemed to work exactly as advertised. It took experience, and a good nose and a good eye, to mix up food that actually felt and tasted like real food. 

Real food, fresh or not, was a luxury they only saw in the first few days after shore leave; they'd been in space far too long to have any. But Hawke could mix up a mean scrambled eggs -- it was his best signature dish -- and Anders had a way with bacon. The two of them crowded into the tiny kitchen long enough to produce breakfast, swapping places at the heating unit while Anders fried and Hawke measured out coffee mix. 

He nabbed a tray of eggs, bacon and a carafe of coffee, stuck half a stick in his mouth and worked on it while he made his way to the bridge. It smelled like bacon, tasted like bacon, even crunched like bacon -- mostly -- but it had a toughness that was more reminiscent of beef jerky, and took some chewing to get through. 

In the junction near the bow of the ship he ran into Fenris, coming out of the engine room. The elf was just disengaging his interface gauntlet, and his early-morning temper had cooled to a mere sourness of expression. 

Since Hawke's mouth was still full of bacon, Fenris got in the first word. "The gravity modulator is up and running again," he said. "I trust that this satisfies the comfort of my _human_ commanders?" 

Hawke grinned, letting Fenris' prickly sarcasm roll off him as usual. "Thanks, Fenris," he said. "I really appreciate your work." 

"Well…" The sour expression faded further, leaving only a disconsolate pout in its place. It was, Hawke thought, a particularly adorable look on him, and made him want to kiss the last of his disgruntlement away. "You are welcome. I trust that we will be restocking on Kirkwall Station? We're low on palladium buffer insets, and all but dry on orichalcum. I didn't anticipate we'd be in space for so long." 

"Send me a memo with what we need and I'll make sure you get it," Hawke promised him. "I'll hit up Varric; he only deals with reputable suppliers. In the meantime, if you make your way to the gallery, there should be some eggs left." 

Fenris' ears lifted slightly, though he managed to keep the rest of his expression cool. "Eggs? Made by you?" 

Hawke grinned. "With strawberry, just the way you like them," he said. Maker only knew how the elf had formed such a strange taste in breakfast foods, but he adored them. The only reason Hawke didn't make them every day was because Fenris was the only one who liked them that way, but this was a special occasion. "Assuming you get there before Anders eats them all." 

It was an empty threat -- Anders wouldn't eat what he loudly proclaimed to be an 'abomination' of a dish -- but the squeak of protest it drew out of Fenris was more than worth it. Hawke managed to capture Fenris in his arms as he tried to make a break for the gallery, drawing him into a lasting kiss. 

When their lips parted, Hawke breathed softly, then grinned. "And I haven't forgotten -- I still mean to make it up to you later," he said with a wink. "Am I forgiven?" 

Fenris rolled his eyes. "Ridiculous questions," he huffed, and moved on past Hawke towards the gallery. 

Hawke was still grinning when he made his way onto the bridge, the lights brightening into active mode as the captain came on deck. Despite the inauspicious start with the gravity breakdown, it was looking to turn into a good day. 

When he stepped onto the bridge and the doors hissed closed behind him, he always had to stop for a moment just to marvel that this was his, really all his. For as long as Hawke could remember his family had been on the move, hitching rides on near-derelict transport ships packed with hundreds of other workers just like them -- passing from planet to planet to chase the harvest season across the galaxy. His parents, himself, his little brother and sister -- and then, over time, just his mother and siblings.

They'd never had much, and when the civil war broke out in the Ferelden cluster they'd had to leave everything behind and fled to the Free Marches, a scattering of systems not otherwise associated with any solar governments. It had cost them Carver; their overloaded refugee ship had nearly broken down mid-transit, and Carver had been one of those killed by a traumatic pressure loss. The memory of his brother's face -- rimed and lacerated, frozen eternally into an expression of stunned surprise -- would likely never leave his nightmares.

The three of them washed up in Kirkwall orbit, surely the most Maker-forsaken planet in a thousand light-years in any direction, destitute and hopeless. And there, at last, their fortunes changed: a piloting competition in the Deep Trenches that gouged the planetary surface. The entry fee had been steep, fifty sovs just to get your name in the lists, but it had paid off -- Hawke had not only survived the lethal, hair-raising bloodsport for the amusement of Kirkwall's wealthy viewers, but finished in record time. Not bad for a hick son of migrant workers, not bad at all. 

The prize from the competition had been more money than Hawke and his family had ever seen in their lives. He'd used some of it to buy himself a small, fast, and maneuverable Fade-capable skipper, and devoted the rest to his family. Mother and Bethany were living comfortably now in a luxury residential arco over on Starkhaven; he still visited them every now and then when he passed through the region. 

If he'd wanted to, he could have retired to laze around in luxury right with them. But he hadn't been ready to settle down; the deep black still called to him, and the restlessness in his blood answered. So here he was -- Garrett Hawke, pilot, salvager, and technically millionaire, juggling his coffee in one hand and breakfast in the other as he tried to press the buttons on the captain's panel with his free fingers. 

It took several stabs of his pinky and ring fingers to bring up the local planetary net, and he sat back in his chair and drank his coffee as the public commission listings began to scroll up before his eyes. Nothing in the listings really jumped out at him, nothing that would be worth the cost of fuel and time to jet out there for the rewards promised. That didn't really surprise him, since the public listings tended to be the tame end of the pool: restrictions both official and unofficial on what could be offered on the public boards tended to filter out the really interesting stuff. To score a high-level commission, you had to talk to the right people. 

The best salvage jobs, the most profitable ones, were also always the riskiest. High-end salvage was not a job that could be done by robots or wage slaves; it required expertise, experience, and a purely human level of chutzpah. Hawke was one of the best in the business. He took the most dangerous, most bizarre, and above all most rewarding missions, and he always came back from it alive. And a great part of how he did that was having the best team. While he might have gone for one of the tamer jobs if they'd been really strapped for cash, it seemed almost unsporting to take those jobs away from the less fabulous folk in the trade. 

Closing out of the public records, Hawke shoveled strawberry eggs and reconstituted bacon in his mouth with one hand while he tapped in a particular comm number with his other. By the time the signal connected, bringing up a familiar face in the hologram tank, he had finished his breakfast and was guzzling the last of the coffee.  

The face that formed in the holo tank made him smile, even if it was a face that only a mother could love: a heavy brow, a broad nose that had been broken on more than one occasion and healed crooked, broad lips split by an unaesthetic scar. But when the face's owner smiled, it lit up his features with such a warm and lively personality that the whole visage was transformed.  

"Hawke!" Varric greeted him, pushing aside a data tablet and a stack of plastic flimsies to focus on the console. "Good to see you again. I take it from this call that you're still alive, and haven't managed to get killed out in the great black yonder yet?"

 "No, not yet," Hawke said, unable to keep from smiling in return. Varric was an old friend; he'd been the one to sponsor Hawke into the piloting competition that had earned him his ship, taking only a reasonable broker's fee out of the winnings. "Same goes for you; that toxic shithole you call a planet hasn't managed to poison you yet?"

Varric laughed, pushing his chair back from the desk slightly in order to fold his hands over his ample torso. It wasn't just the foreshortened perspective that made him look broad and squat; Varric was a dwarf, an expatriate from Orzammar, one of the heavy-grav worlds settled by the Aeducan corporation generations ago. Although their bodies were genetically adapted for the heavier gravity, that didn't stop the dwarves from emigrating out from their homeworld all through the known galaxy. It was easier for a dwarf to adapt to one of the 'lightworlds,' as they called it, than it would be for any normal human to adapt to the crushing three gees of the dwarven planet. Hawke had been to Orzammar once; once had been enough. 

"I'm telling you, Kirkwall's got plenty of love to share," Varric defended his adopted home. "You've just got to look at her in the right light."

Hawke's eyebrows rose. "Varric, Kirkwall is a barren ball of radioactive rock and dust with a toxic atmosphere, strong enough storms to crash a battleship, and the worst concentrations of organized crime in the Attican Arm," he said. "It's a shithole." 

"Yes, but it's a shithole with hundreds of kilotons of unexcavated palladium and dawnstone," Varric chuckled. "There's literally billions of sovs of potential under that gooey radioactive crust, just waiting to be dug up and refined. Like I said: you just have to look at her in the right light."

Hawke laughed, and Varric smiled broadly. "So what can I do for you, Hawke?" he said, getting to business. He pulled the data tablet over to his hand, poised expectantly for Hawke's answer. 

"Can't a man call an old friend just to chat?" Hawke protested. In all likelihood he would have looked Varric up no matter what -- he didn't pass through Kirkwall often enough to pass up the opportunity -- but he preferred to combine his calls. For all he teased, Varric never minded combining business with pleasure; for the quick-minded dwarf, business _was_ pleasure. 

"Sure, but I know you better than that," Varric snorted. "Dashing space adventurer that you are, I'm thinking it's not Hightown's fabulous day spas that brought you in-system. Looking for a job?" 

"As always," Hawke said with a rueful grin. "Got anything good for me?" 

Varric hummed thoughtfully. "There are a few interesting items I flagged, when I heard that the Lady Amell had made transition on the system border. Let's see." He called up a file on his data pad, and quickly linked it into the comm panel to flash up on Hawke's screen. "Here's one, shipping freighter ran into a grav eddy midway between Sahrnia and the Daarvarad, scattered the contents halfway across the solar system. It's money lying on the ground." 

"Daarvarad." Hawke frowned. "That's a Qunari name. Isn't that in the Seheron system?" 

"Yup, which is why nobody's dared to go after it yet," Varric replied. "The fighting is heating up between the Vints and the Qunari again, and nobody wants to get caught in the crossfire."

Hawke grimaced. "It's a nice thought, Varric, but you know why I don't want to mix in with the Vints." Wherever the Tevinter fleets went, the slaver ships followed, scooping up prisoners of war and refugee bystanders alike. They had a nasty tendency of hanging around in stealth in systems even long after the warships had left, waiting for some poor bastard to decide it was safe enough to make a break for it. 

"I know, but the Qunari are on a strong push right now," Varric coaxed him. "You could probably get in and out without ever seeing a Vint flagship." 

"I'd really rather not chance it," Hawke said. He didn't expand on why, but then again, he didn't have to; Varric had known Fenris almost as long as he had. Hell, Varric probably kept current tabs on the bounty on Fenris' contract. 

He'd already decided to not even mention this job possibility to Fenris. There was a better-than-even chance that Fenris would insist on them taking it anyway, despite -- or perhaps even because of -- the danger to him. _Let them come claim me if they can,_ he'd insist: _I will scatter their ashes in our wake. I am not afraid of them, Hawke. They should be afraid of_ me _._  

But whether Fenris agreed or not, Hawke knew his lover's life and safety was worth more than any potential profits. Even if the job went off without a hitch, Fenris would be stressed and upset the entire time they were in Tevinter-contested territory. It wasn't worth it. "Thanks, but no thanks." 

Varric shrugged. "I thought you might say that, but I wanted to at least let you know the possibility," he said, dashing the file and calling up a new one. "Next up, something a little stranger. There's been sightings of a 'ghost ship' hanging around the fringe of the Serpent nebula, Kappa sector." 

Hawke picked up the datafile, eyes skimming over the basics. "Ghost ship in what sense?" 

"In the sense that it looks like a derelict -- no energy signals, bleeding debris -- but it's still moving around." Varric's voice dropped to a hushed tone, sending a shiver up Hawke's spine; bloody overdramatic bastard. "Every time someone's gotten a lock on it, or made a move towards it, it backs off and disappears into a dust cloud. For obvious reasons, nobody wants to take the chance to follow it."

"Obviously," Hawke grimaced. Dust clouds, shielding the darkness of space from the light of stars, always had the potential to be hiding dark matter aberrations. There were probably more horror stories attributed to DMAs than there actually were DMAs in the galaxy, but nobody wanted to take the risk; by the time you realized you were sharing space with with one, it was already far too late.

"But if you want to hear strange, wait till you hear the best part." Varric raised his hands to frame his face, making squiggly motions with his fingers. He'd been watching too many damn old horror movies, Hawke thought. "About all the sightings can tell us is that it's a Federation ship, probably military. But nobody can get a read on the model, or the SN. It doesn't match any known records. At all." 

"Huh." Hawke blinked, sitting forward in his chair as he began to read with more interest. "That's... weird." 

"Definitely weird, could be lucrative," Varric agreed. "Are you in?" 

Hawke grinned. In truth, he'd been hooked since the words 'ghost ship' were mentioned; the prospect of profits was just a bonus to that. A hefty, hefty bonus, with any luck. "I am so very in. Toss me the details." 

"They're on their way," Varric said with a smug grin. "Usual rates, of course." 

"Of course," Hawke agree. "Speaking of usual rates, I've got some resupply and refitting to take care of. Tomwise still around?" 

"Nah, he pulled up stakes and skipped on a freighter," Varric said dismissively. "Got wind of a Federation investigation team heading his way, I hear. There's a new kid who's absorbed most of his client base; he's not bad. I'll send you his way. Does this mean you and the boys'll be taking a few days shore leave? First round is free at the Hanged Man, as ever." 

"Sure," Hawke said. "We'll catch up over dinner. Topside, mind you. I don't care _how_ authentic you think the Nevarran shwarma stalls are down in the refinery district; I'm not going downside." 

"You're missing out, I'm telling you," Varric protested. "The sulfides in the air gives it a real tang you just can't duplicate on a space station."

 "And you know what? I'm just fine with that," Hawke said dryly. "My lifestyle gives me plenty of thrills, Varric; I don't need to court heavy metal poisoning on top of it. Not all of us have your super-enhanced liver." 

Varric chuckled dryly, not taking offense; he rarely did, being more smug than defensive about the genetic modifications that had set his people apart from the rest of the human race centuries gone. "Someday, Hawke," he said, leveling one finger at the video feed. "Someday I'll seduce you to the delights that Kirkwall has to offer, and you'll never have the heart to leave orbit again. You know in your heart that you miss real planets, life on a space station can't really compare. Someday you'll have to rejoin real society again. Until then, you can just stay shut up in your little floating box and pine over what you're missing." 

Hawke laughed, and they ended the conversation there, on a warm and cordial note. Only once the channel was cut did Hawke let the smile slowly fade from his face, and he sat on the bridge of the ship for a long time, lost in thought, picking the last few crumbs of bacon and eggs from his breakfast dish. 

Did he miss planets? Of course he did. The _Lady Amell_ was a good ship but she was small to be your entire world, to be cooped up with just a few other people (no matter how much you cared for those other people) for weeks and months on end. Ship food was nothing like real food; ship air always had the flat, deadened smell that came of being perpetually recycled. On a ship you could never get the broad skies and wide-open horizons of a planet, storms and wind and clouds and carpets of green, endless roads and sprawling cityscapes and real saltwater oceans. 

But -- 

He stood up, brushing the crumbs off his shirt, and walked forward to the main viewscreen. A flick of a control turned on forward view, and he stared out at a vista of Kirkwall's curving horizon. The planet's surface glowed yellow-orange, testament to the heavy concentrations of sulfur in the rocks, and dust storms swirled at the edge of view. Canted at a wild angle to the planet's surface, thousands of miles above, sprawled the glittering carapace of Hightown -- the stratospheric installations that served as the interface between Kirkwall and the rest of the galactic trade. 

At several points, hair-thin strands -- actually hundreds of meters of reinforced carbonite -- threaded from the station to the surface and back again, the massive Lifts which trundled wealth steadily from the planet below to the station above. Down on the planet, Hawke knew, crowded acres of ramshackle settlements housing the miners and laborers who worked to extract the valuable minerals, then refine them into something worth exporting. Despite the incredibly concentrated wealth of the metals, most of them eked out a life that was one step away from starvation. None of the vast wealth of the planet ever trickled down to _them._

Hawke knew what life was like in working camps like those; he'd grown up in just such shanty towns. The people down on the planet's surface were mined just as the ore was, every drop of wealth and life sucked out of them to feed the appetites of the people above. Hawke knew that. He had no illusions about that. Down on the planets, everything was controlled, directed, used and exploited. Someone like Fenris, who still had an unfilled contract bounty on his head, would be sucked into industrial bondage and never seen again. Someone like Anders, whose existence wasn't even legal in this part of the galaxy, would be locked in a box and strapped to a computer until it ate his mind. That was what life on _planets_ was like; that was what life in _society_ was like. It was a machine that dragged you under and devoured you, then discarded your broken husk when it was done. 

Space was boring, yes; it was cramped, yes. The food sucked, the entertainment was limited, and there was never really any getting away from the knowledge that you were one filtration unit away from drinking your own piss. But in space, unfettered by any planetary gravity well, you could fly free. 

Hawke straightened, turned off the display port view of Kirkwall with a snap; turned away to the rest of the ship to find his lovers.

 

* * *

 

~tbc... 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a lovely illustration done by the incomparable Queen Schadenfreude! It can be viewed **[here.](http://mikkeneko.tumblr.com/post/149725742324/hawke-drifted-awake-for-the-first-few-fuzzy)**


	2. Hightown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke and his shipmates enjoy a nice shore leave in Kirkwall, until trouble arrives. Also Isabela.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Worldstate notes:  
> Unusually for me, Justice is not in this fic. I wanted to include our best beloved cranky Fade spirit, but for all I twisted and turned the idea about, I could not find a role in this fic that really worked for Justice. And given a choice between including him in a token or flattened parody of his character, or not including him at all, I opted for the latter.
> 
> This also means that the Anders in this fic is not fully 'our' Anders. He is not joined with Justice, so much of the man we knew in DA2 is not present in this version of him. Instead, this is more like Awakening Anders; still angry and bitter over the treatment of his people in society and devoted to his own freedom above all else, but not dedicated to a life of revolution.
> 
> (Yet.)

The Kirkwall High Atmosphere Commercial Spaceport and Habitat -- Hightown, as the locals called it -- was a sprawling, glittering expanse of space station real estate. Sometimes Hawke could barely believe the sheer size of it -- but then, the titanium and carbon that made most of the raw building blocks for the station were pretty much waste products from the mining operations below, so they could expand as much as they liked. There was enough wealth flowing through the planet's orbit to build a dozen space stations; Kirkwall's trade barons decked out their trade hub in enough dazzling luxury to entice trade fleets from stations far and wide to make it a regular route stop. Rich, spacious and cosmopolitan, it wasn't hard to see how people like Varric fit in naturally here.  
  
Hawke was sure that if he had to live here, he'd go stark raving mad within a month -- but for a couple of days of shore leave, it was a welcome relief from ship life. The three of them passed through the quarantine locks, a disembodied computer voice declaring them all-clear, and looked around at Hightown's commercial district with bright eagerness.  
  
Well -- Hawke was eager, at least. And he was fairly sure that Anders was too, for all the faintly sarcastic expression as his eye moved over the extravagant sculptures and murals decorating the docking strip. Fenris, as was usual for him, looked like he was being asked to enter a cesspit.

"Right! Let's spend some money!" Hawke clapped his hands together with brisk enthusiasm. "Anders, you pick up whatever medical supplies are lacking. I'll see to our oxy and fuel refills and get more food. Fenris, you can hit up all the engineering equipment you keep complaining we're low on."

Anders nodded, while Fenris grimaced unhappily. Hawke frowned at his lover in concern. "Aren't you looking forward to it, Fenris? You've been cooped up on the ship for ages now."

"Crowds make me... twitchy." Fenris shrugged one shoulder. "I can never stop thinking that any one of them could hide a Tevinter hunter, poised to pull out a stun tag and take me down."

Hawke cleared his throat diffidently. He knew Fenris had good reason for his paranoia, but at the same time… "You know, the Free Marches might not be officially part of the Federation, but they're still pretty Andrastean," he offered. "Tevinters aren't welcome here in the best of circumstances, and their slave-catchers certainly couldn't blend into the crowd."

"I know that, Hawke," Fenris shot back, then he sighed. "I'm aware that it is not an entirely rational response. But I still feel it."

"You know," Anders spoke up. "I _could_  help you with that. Maybe if you'd let me..."

"Or maybe you could keep your filthy thoughts inside your own head where they belong," Fenris snapped back. "My feelings are my own, good and bad, and I will have no one else meddle with them."

Hawke winced. He could have told Anders that offer wouldn't go over well. And yet, that never stopped Anders from trying. "And I suppose if you were bleeding out on a stretcher, you'd refuse medical help because "your blood is your own" and you don't want anyone else 'meddling' with bandages or antibiotics, would you?" Anders demanded indignantly.

Fenris turned on him with a snarl, and Anders leaned back, holding his hands palm-out in front of him. "Fine! Fine!" he exclaimed. "Maker forbid I try to help!"

"If I ever want your help, _esper_ , I'll ask for it," Fenris said, emphasizing the word as though it was an indictment. "Though I suspect we'd see the star burn cold first."

Anders rolled his eyes theatrically. "Oh thanks, could you maybe NOT out me as an illegal to everyone within hearing range?" he said in aggravation.

"Come on you guys, settle down," Hawke appealed to them both. He moved to put himself between them, intervening physically as well as with words. "This is supposed to be our down time! Let's not spend it fighting."

"Let's not spend it in each other's company at all," Fenris grumbled. "I have to put up with enough of your presence when we are stuck on the ship, I don't see why I should have to deal with you ashore, as well."

"Likewise," Anders spat. Hawke sighed.

Obligatory bickering done for the day, the three of them made their plans and went their separate ways. Hawke knew perfectly well that Fenris, once he had accomplished his chores, would likely hole up in one of Hightown's many bars and spend the rest of the day drinking. He would be lying if he said it didn't worry him; but Fenris was an adult, as as long as he didn't drink while they were underway, it wasn't his place to babysit him. He put his worries firmly out of his mind, and went about his own duties.

 

* * *

 

 

The best part about delegating chores, Hawke had found, was that he got to offload all the tedious work to his shipmates while still sounding like he was pulling his weight. Outfitting a fade-capable ship was a very complex task involving hundreds of different materials in the right quantities, it was true -- but the advantage of docking in a highly modernized and heavily traveled spaceport as Kirkwall was that virtually everything to do with resupply was automated. All you had to do was input the type of ship, length of journey and number of crew into the keypad, and it would automatically calculate, collate, and deliver the invoice for all the supplies at once -- which would then be delivered and loaded by robots. Not only that, but being a returning customer meant that most of the vendors already had his order on file -- all he had to do was contact them and hit 'reorder.'

It was not yet noon on Hightown and the _Lady Amell's_ refitting was well underway, with no further effort required from him. Maker, Hawke loved the future.

He ate a leisurely lunch in a café with a grand starscape view on the night side of the station, paying more attention to the novelty of real vegetables than to the everyday sight of the stars. Then it was time for _real_ shopping -- not for necessities, but for the little luxuries that made their lifestyle all worthwhile. Space was tightly restricted on most spaceships, including theirs, so he had to keep the focus compact -- video disks, tasteful art, skinsuit textures. Fresh food, for as long as it lasted. He stopped by one sex toy emporium, greatly tempted by a few items on offer, but regretfully decided that he really ought to consult his partners first before making any more purchases they'd all have to live with.

Hawke wandered out on the concourse in mid-afternoon and found Anders sitting on one of the benches, a drink in hand and a small smile on his face as he watched the glittering crowd go by.

"Looking for a good time, sailor?" Hawke joked, dropping beside him on the bench. Anders raised his brows at him, lifting his drink in a mock toast.

"I'm having a pretty good time right here," he said with a grin, and took another swallow of his drink.

"Really?" Hawke glanced around the concourse. The interior decorating was pleasant enough -- everything on Hightown was -- but nothing special. "I'd have thought you'd be stocking up on everything you can't get on a spaceship."

"I am," Anders said. He looked out at the bustling crowd and spread his arms as if gathering the entire population of the station into them. "This is what I miss most, when we're out in space. Just having other people around, close enough that I can hear them… feel them. Especially in a crowd like this -- the noise, the pushing of the people -- it's a rush."

Hawke blinked in surprise, then turned his gaze out on the crowd, trying to imagine what it was that his lover saw or heard that he couldn't. "Seems like it would get on your nerves after a while," he offered.

Anders shrugged. "Sometimes," he said. "I mean, it can be distracting, and makes it hard to sleep sometimes. But… I miss it."

He sounded wistful, and Hawke felt a momentary pang of sorrow: that their lifestyle took them so far away from the press of humanity that Anders loved so much. Still, it was what it was -- and he knew Anders wouldn't want his pity.

"I'll leave you to it, then," he said instead, rising from the bench. "I've got a few hours before I'm supposed to meet Varric for dinner -- will you be there?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Anders said, grinning.

"Until then, Varric mentioned this absolutely fabulous day spa on the planet side, near the Viscount's suite," Hawke said. "See you later, love."

Anders caught his hand as he moved, pressed a small kiss to the back of it, then reeled an obliging Hawke in for a kiss on the lips. A smile on his face, Hawke wandered off down the causeway.

He was waiting for an elevator to take him down to the planet side of the station, when a familiar silhouette caught his eye. Hawke began to get up, then aborted the movement as the figure swung one long, shapely leg over the bench he was sitting on and sat, resting her chin on her hands.

"Well, well, look what we have here," the women purred, a sparkle in her golden eyes as she smirked at Hawke like the cat that had caught the canary. "If it isn't Kirkwall's famous hotshot pilot. Fancy meeting you here, Hawke."

"Isabela!" Hawke exclaimed, greeting her with delight even as his mind flew the location of his wallet and cards. With Isabela, you could never be too cautious. "I had no idea you were in-system. Staying for long?"

Isabela shrugged, her skintight ship suit flowing like water over her generous figure, light chasing over glittering spangles embedded in the fabric. Similar sparkles decorated her fingers, her ears, her brows and her nose, a wealth of jewelry that accentuated her striking natural beauty. "Not if these blasted Song patrols keep poking around Kirkwall's shipping lanes," she complained. "Can't a girl even offload her questionably acquired cargo in peace without the bloody Templars sticking their nose in?"

Hawke half-laughed, concern tempering his urge to tease. "Templars giving you trouble?" he asked.

"Like they ever do anything else," Isabela grumbled.

The Order of the Templars of Holy Song was, on paper at least, a peacekeeping organization devoted to escorting freighters along the shipping lanes to protect them from the dangers of pirates. Less officially, they were also the Council of Song's military arm, dedicated to enforcing the Andrastean faith throughout the Federation -- and, wherever they could get away with it, beyond their borders as well. Knowing Isabela, she could easily have come into conflict with the Templars in either of these capacities.

Hawke knew Isabela as a friendly rival in the salvaging business -- like him, she concentrated on high-profit salvaging jobs. The only reason their rivalry wasn't more serious was that salvage was only a part-time occupation for Isabela; she spent the rest of her time in the negotiation business. Specifically the business of negotiating with shipping captains for their cargo and profits in exchanged for their continued well-being. In other words, she was a pirate. She tended to bounce between piracy and salvage depending on which offered the most lucrative, least risky opportunity of the week. Hawke had run across her a few times in the field, each occasion a highly memorable one.

"How is Merrill? Is she all right?" Hawke asked. He'd met Merrill on Kirkwall first -- they'd been friends before Merrill had struck up with Isabela herself, in fact, and before Hawke had gone on to win the piloting competition. She seemed happy enough being Isabela's pilot, but if they'd been having trouble with Templars, that was reason enough to worry.

"She's fine, so sweet of you to ask. And I'm also fine," Isabela said, her eyes flashing. "Thanks for caring."

"You're always fine," Hawke waved this away with a flick of his fingers. "So, is there a third crew member who's also all right, or are you still looking?"

Isabela snorted. "Not that it's any of your business, but we're running short-handed at the moment."

"Whatever happened to that redheaded elf in the purple get-up, whatever her name was..." Hawke's hands sketched vague curved outlines in the air as he tried to put a name with the figure. "Tali? Talis?"

"Tallis, yes," Isabela said with a nod. She grimaced at whatever memory this conjured. "Lovely girl, but no accounting for taste. She ran off to join the viddethari."

Hawke winced. He'd never understand what drew people to cults, especially ones with such lunatic, self-destructive premises such as the Viddethari, which preached the supremacy of the Qun over the human races and taught that the entire galaxy would someday be conquered and all humans subjugated or wiped out. It was easy enough to see why the qunari would subscribe to such a philosophy, but why in the maker's name would any human want to? "Ouch," he offered.

"Yeah." Isabela looked unusually pensive over this.

"And then there was Leliana, who ran off to join the Council… and wasn't there that dwarf, Dagna?" Hawke shook his head in mock pity. "You really do have a thing for redheads. Trying to fill some void in your life? Still pining after a _certain someone?"_

Isabela glowered at him. "You know," she said in a clipped voice, "You're really not as funny as you think you are."

Hawke raised his hands defensively. "Well, I'm just saying that maybe you should start actually considering qualifications instead of just how good they are in in the bunk."

"Don't you have somewhere to be? Nebulas to explore and all that?" Isabela demanded, drumming her fingers on the bench surface. "With luck, you _won't_ even get eaten by the boogeymen who lurk in the dark!"

"That's why I have a Specialist of the Grey onboard, Isabela," Hawke countered. "You should consider signing on one, too. Then maybe you could start taking on the _really_ profitable jobs."

"But why should we do such hard and dangerous work," Isabela said, widening her eyes, "When it would be so much easier just to wait until you're on your way back all fat and happy, and ambush your ship mid-transit?" She smiled sweetly.

Hawke shook his head. "Isabela, you're a terror," he complained.

She grinned as she stood up fluidly from the bench, then leaned down to plant a kiss on his cheek. "Why thank you, Hawke," she said. She turned and strolled away.

He was still watching her thread her way through the crowd, appreciating how easily she slipped among them, when his communicator beeped. Keying it on, he glanced at the screen and saw a message from Varric.

_May have to cancel on dinner. Just ran ID on a new ship that's docked in 0004f-22. Templar plates. Might want to get Blondie under cover._

Hawke swore to himself, quietly but viciously, as he stood up in a hurry. The day spa of such fame was just going to have to wait for another time.

 

* * *

 

 

Anders was still right where Hawke had left him, chatting with a few locals in the main concourse. He looked up without prompting, his eyes searching the crowd until they found Hawke's, and the easy relaxation ran out of his face like water at whatever he read there.

He was already gathering up his bags by the time Hawke reached him, excusing himself from his companions. Without a word being exchanged they fell into step together, heading for the docking bay -- not quite fast enough to arouse suspicion in any watchers, but definitely in enough of a hurry that no one would try to engage them.

"Templars?" Anders said quietly, as soon as they were out of earshot.

Hawke nodded. "Isabela said they were sniffing around the station, but I had no idea they were actually in dock until Varric warned me," he said.

"Ah," Anders nodded. A small smile curved his mouth, dispelling the bleak expression. "And how _is_ Isabela? It's been a while."

"Memorable," Hawke sighed.

Anders chuckled. "As always," he said.

Hawke sent a message to Fenris as they walked, asking him to meet them back at the ship as soon as possible. He wasn't sure exactly where on the station Fenris had gone, but he wasn't worried; Fenris wasn't the one who was in danger. Even if trouble found him, Fenris was more than capable of taking care of himself.

As he was finishing the last few lines of the message, Anders suddenly stumbled beside him, face contorting in a grimace of pain.

"You all right, love?" Hawke said, quickly catching Anders' elbow.

"Fine," Anders gasped, although the pallor of his face said otherwise. "They're here. They've set off a screamer."

Psychic screamer, Hawke guessed, given that neither he nor anyone else in the concourse seemed to be able to hear it.

Anders moved more slowly after that; Hawke helped him along as fast as he could, trying to keep them both as casual and inconspicuous as possible even while he was jittering with nerves. He kept a watchful eye on the crowds, looking out for the sleek silver armor that would announce the presence of the Templars, but saw nothing the whole way back.

As slowly as they were moving, it was still a surprise when they reached their docking berth at last and found Fenris already there. As Hawke moved into his orbit for a quick, tight embrace he could smell the wine on Fenris' breath; but his green eyes were clear and hard with focus as he turned to Anders.

"Anders," he said quietly, and took Anders' arm in a firm grip. "You will be fine. We will not let them have you."

Anders, pale and sweating and shaking, looked into Fenris' eyes and managed a tremulous smile. Hawke passed Anders from his own arms into Fenris' -- not without some reluctance -- and Fenris led Anders off through the hatch to the ship while Hawke turned to the necessary tedious details of filing their departure through traffic control.

This was just a precaution -- should have been just a precaution. There was no reason to think that the Templars were targeting Anders specifically, that they knew he was here or even who he was. But the _other_ main function of the Templars, aside from making pirates' lives difficult and enforcing Andrastean doctrine, was the hunting down of rogue -- by which they meant, unlicensed -- espers.

Within the Andrastean Federation itself -- where the Templars had unlimited powers of search, seizure, and escalation of force -- every human born with psychic powers was identified as a young age and taken as a ward of the Council of Song. Officially, this was to prevent them from unleashing their supernatural powers against defenseless civilians and to provide them with vital training to control their abilities. Unofficially, it was how the Council of Song maintained their supremacy over the planetary systems within their borders. Control over the espers within their borders gave them access to the Fade, without which their ships would be stranded by the light-speed barrier -- and, in a pinch, gave them an army of psychics against which few conventional military forces could stand.

The Council of Song claimed that their espers were all devoutly loyal to the Andrastean Federation, happy, content and well-treated in their secluded enclaves. Possibly they really believed their own propaganda, but pretty much everyone else in the galaxy knew that was a load of horseshit. The 'wardship' of the council was little more than slavery under a prettier title; espers were not considered citizens of the Federation and did not enjoy their rights, could not own property or titles, sue in court, enter into legal contracts, marry, or have children. It was little wonder that those that could -- like Anders -- fled the Federation's custody at every chance they got.

Hence, the Templars. Specialized in anti-esper tactics, they provided prison guards for the ones at home and bounty hunters for the ones abroad. Technically speaking, Kirkwall was not a member of the Andrastean Federation and the Templars had no jurisdiction here. But the planetary system was still Andrastean by culture, if not by law, and espers were still so reviled among the general populace that the authorities had little incentive to stand in the Templars' way when they went on the hunt. Technically the device they had set off in the main concourse -- an electronic screamer that broadcast on a psychic wavelength -- was completely illegal in civilian settings. But, since the only ones who were affected by it were espers, who cared?

Hawke had just filed a departure plan with Hightown Traffic Control when a hail came over his comms from a frequency he didn't recognize. He glanced at the originating signature -- docking bay 0004f-22. Gritting his teeth, he set the system to ignore the hail, and went aboard the Lady Amell.

He found Fenris and Anders both waiting in the cross-corridor beyond the docking station. Hawke looked at Fenris first. "What's engineering's status?" he asked. "Did you get all the resupply you needed? Repairs?"

Fenris glanced at Anders, then looked back to him. "We are ready to go at any time," he said. "I took care of all the supplies first thing in dock -- do not insult me by thinking otherwise."

Hawke noticed he didn't comment on the maintenance or refittings he'd planned to do; they'd meant to be in Kirkwall for more than a single day. But they always prioritized essential repairs and resupply first, just in case something like this happened and they had to leave in a hurry. "All right," he said. "As soon as traffic control gets back to me, we'll be on our way."

"They know I'm here," Anders said, voice barely a whisper. His skin was the color of milk, and his breathing was too careful -- too controlled. Hawke was a bit surprised that the rest of them weren't feeling Anders' obvious panic -- yet, anyway. "They're coming for me."

"They don't know anything and they won't get near you," Hawke replied. It came out sharper than he intended, and he stopped to take a deep breath. Okay, maybe Anders' anxiety was leaking more than he'd thought.

He looked at Fenris again. "Why don't you take him into the engine room?" he asked. "The shielding there will block all scans." It would also block any unintentional psychic leakage, which had the potential to get much worse if the situation went downhill or Anders lost control of himself.

It was not a small thing to ask -- Fenris considered the engine room his own private space, and did not easily bear intrusions into his territory. But he nodded agreement without hesitation, and taking Anders firmly by the shoulder, steered the esper off.

Reassured that Fenris had Anders in hand, Hawke went back up to the bridge. The approved flight plan from Kirkwall traffic control was waiting on his console when he got there; he took a few seconds to sign off on delivery and invoices also waiting for his attention, then fed the flight plan into the computer. In a bare few minutes, the Lady Amell had released its magnetic seals and was floating away from the Hightown docks towards open space.

They'd drilled everything a hundred times to be fast, smooth and efficient. But as quickly as they'd made their withdrawal, it hadn't been fast enough. Hawke had barely cleared Hightown's direct traffic control boundary when another hail hit the Lady Amell, this one from a different address than the first. He told the ship to ignore it, but the hail just sat there, blinking insistently.

Stalling for time while he decided what to do, Hawke looked up the transponder numbers of the first two hails. They came up depressingly quickly: both were in the public registry. The ship still in dock at Hightown was the Andrastean Federation Star Vessel _Threnodies 8:13;_ the one hailing them now was the AFSV _Apotheosis 1:14._ Templar ships, unmistakably. They were like cockroaches: you never got just one.

The proximity warning blapped on his console, and Hawke checked the radar with a sinking stomach. There it was, a second ship shadowing his own, matching velocities in a way that could only be deliberate. Hawke cursed under his breath: the Lady Amell was pulling away from the station at a steady acceleration, but starting from a dead halt, there was little chance they would be able to outrun any pursuer. And they wouldn't be able to make Fade transit until they crossed the system border.

He turned back to the communications console and, with some reluctance, switched it on. "Yes?" he called into the microphone, not particularly encouraging about it.

" _This is the Andrastean Federation vessel Apotheosis 1:14. Lady Amell, please stand by for inspection."_ No picture filled the holo-tank, just a voice; and the voice was so heavily filtered and computerized that it made the hair on the back of Hawke's neck stand up. This was not a computer trying to sound human, but a human voice using a synthesizer to strip all hints of humanity for it. The Templars claimed that they did this to reduce the ability of espers to use the connection of human voice to mount a psychic attack, although Hawke, living and working with an esper for as long as he had, knew that was complete bullshit. More likely, they did it just because they knew how unnerving it made them.

He had to force his voice to remain calm and unflustered as he replied. "Acknowledged, Apotheosis 1:14. This is Garrett Hawke, captain of the Lady Amell, and I will not be doing so."

 _"We request your cooperation in standing by for inspection,"_ the eerie monotone voice replied.

"On what grounds?" Hawke challenged.

 _"We are conducting a sweep of the area for rogue espers_." The -- man? Woman? Who could tell? On the other end of the comm was implacable.

"Sorry, no espers here," Hawke said flippantly, even as his hands danced over the controls. The _Lady Amell_ turned, changing vectors slightly, angling away from the planet and towards the system's limit.

The Templar ship turned with him, slightly inside his new vector, keeping pace doggedly. _"Your ship registers as a Fade-capable vessel_ ," the Templar voice persisted.

Hawke cursed internally. Fade-capable vessels had a form that followed functions that didn't really apply in normal space; they had to be aerodynamic even if they never landed, their hulls colored and patterned in specific ways to navigate the mysterious landscape of the Fade. It opened the vistas of the galaxy to them, but it also made it impossible to disguise -- and where there was a Fade ship, there necessarily was an esper to pilot it. "Yep, she is, unfortunately we lost our pilot a few seasons back. Such a tragedy. Now I have this beautiful ship and no one to pilot it. Crying shame, really," Hawke rattled off in a bored drawl.

There was a distinct pause before the Templar voice returned; probably, Hawke figured, because they weren't used to people so openly bullshitting them without regard to whether they knew it. _"Captain Hawke, we must require the Lady Amell to stand by to be boarded,"_ the Templar voice said, still as flat and emotionless as ever.

"This is a privately owned and registered shipping vessel. On whose authority exactly do you require this?" Hawke snapped back. He altered course again.

The Templar ship matched his course again. _"By the authority of the Council of Song."_

"This is the Free Marches, not the Andreastean Federation; the Council of Song does not have authority over commercial vessels in this system. Are you gentlemen by any chance lost?" Hawke inquired genially. "Maybe you should contact Kirkwall Station; they offer complimentary star system maps."

 _"Captain Hawke, we believe you may be under the influence of psionic coercion."_ Alarms began to flash on Hawke's console as his ship's sensors began to register the presence of laser sights hitting his hull. _"Stand by for boarding immediately or we will be compelled to use force."_

"You can believe anything you like, but I am damn well not bending over for you lot of blighters," Hawke muttered, even as he kept his eyes fixed on his plot. He changed course one more time, twisting the Lady Amell along its axis to kerf sideways through space alongside the Templar ship's hull. For the third time the Templar ship moved to follow him, turning to correct its course alongside his --

And Hawke snapped his ship around, flipping the smaller, more agile vessel in space until its thrusters directly faced the Templar ship's sensor bank, less than a kilometer away. He fired all thrusters at full power, straight through to the redline, sending a violent cascade of ion discharge directly into the Templar's eyes.

Even before the discharge had completed he snapped the Lady Amell around again on a new header, slammed madly on the ship's acceleration, and boosted the smaller ship away from its pursuer. The Templar ship, now completely blinded, swerved and heaved as it fired wildly into the space where Hawke's ship had been a moment before. A tirade of furious threats and invective poured from his communications bank, still in that eerie, metallic monotone, at least until Hawke spare a hand to slap it off.

Hawke spent several nerve-wracking minutes playing dodgeball with the Templars' lethal plasma bolts, until he'd managed to clear the immediate envelope of fire. Once there, he adjusted his heading again, then hit the keys that would convert the ship into stealth mode. Stealth mode would prevent the Lady Amell from leaving any incriminating mass or energy emissions that pursuing ships could read, though it put a serious cap on their acceleration until the mode was turned off.

Once they were stealthed and on their new heading, Hawke finally exhaled, leaning back in the captain's chair and checking on sensors. The ionization burst that Hawke had used was only temporary -- the Templar ship would probably have its sensors back within an hour. But by that time, even at their reduced acceleration, the Lady Amell would be so far away that the ship would never be able to pick him out against the blackness of space. They were in the clear. 

Activating the all-ship announcement system, he said, "Crisis averted, folks. We're on our way out-system with no ships in pursuit. You never should have doubted me." 

A bit childish, perhaps, but the rising relief was making him feel giddy. Hawke stood from the chair and stretched to work some of the tension out of his muscles, then headed out of the bridge with a spring in his step. By the time he reached the engine room, he was actually whistling, a sharp note that died on his lip as he hit the door panel and got a view of what was going on inside. 

Fenris had Anders up against the ranks of storage cabinets, his hips balanced on the workbench as the elf made a sincere attempt to fuck his brains out. Anders, for his part, was clutching at Fenris' shoulders hard enough to leave marks, moaning throaty encouragement for Fenris to go harder, faster, _more._

Pieces of clothing decorated every surface -- even the engine casing itself -- but not as many as there might have been, since both Fenris and Anders were still half-dressed. They had apparently been enough in a hurry to only want to remove enough clothing to get the job done; Anders still had his shirt and coat on, and Fenris was still in boots and socks. That didn't seem to bother either of them, Anders' palms pressing over the lines embedded in Fenris' skin as Fenris' teeth worried the delicate skin of his throat. 

Hawke stood frozen for a moment, mouth hanging open on a greeting that never got expressed; after a long minute he backed carefully away, a chuckle bubbling in his throat as he shut the door behind him. 

He knew that Fenris and Anders felt more for each other than their often vocal bickering would seem to imply, but it was always nice to have the reminder. He decided, as he made his way back up to the bridge, that he'd pull superadmin privileges just this once to get the tapes from the engine room's cameras. Just for the reminder.

* * *

~tbc...


	3. The Fade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anders, Hawke and Fenris take a trip into the Fade. This goes about as smoothly as a trip in the Fade ever does.

 It took over 250 hours to make the system limit. They could theoretically have done it faster if they'd done a least-time vector straight from their starting point; but anyone could calculate a least-time approach, including the Templars. It was worth taking an extra day to add a few hundred thousand kilometers to the potential search radius. And indeed, as they approached the invisible boundary to the Kirkwall system, there was not another soul in sight. 

The system limit was more of a legal limit than any kind of actual physical or geographical boundary. By interstellar treaty, it was strictly forbidden to make Fade transit inside the limits of any inhabited solar system. Hawke had heard a lot of reasons given for the edict over time: that returning ships brought back material from the Fade that was radioactive, toxic or worse; that lyriad drives had the potential to react adversely with the system's sun, causing it to spontaneously go nova; that transition could accidentally catch surrounding matter and drag it into the Fade with the ship by accident, with gruesome results. _That_ much was certainly true, Hawke knew, but the range was only a few kilometers even with the most powerful drives. There was more than enough empty space in any solar system to transition millions of ships safely all at once. 

Overall, Hawke rather thought it had more to do with common people's superstitions about the Fade than any actual, scientifically substantiated risks. There was so much misinformation, hysteria and paranoia about the Fade and those who traversed it even now, even in an interstellar society built around the miracle of faster-than-light transport.

FTL travel, or Fade travel for short, had been the great discovery that made galactic colonization possible. The implacable laws of physics dictated that nothing made of mass could break the speed-of-light barrier, and even approaching that limit came with an asymptotic fuel cost and a whole slew of unpleasant side effects.

But the light-speed limit only applied to the mundane universe. Hawke didn't pretend to understand the actual mechanics of it -- he was a pilot, not a quantum mathematician -- but any modern schoolchild could recite the theory that the known universe was no more than a hair-thin film of expanded space, stacked up with infinite other universes like a sheaf of paper. The universes were only separated by a veil of infinite thinness, and with the right materials -- and the right precautions -- it was possible to breach that veil and step through to the other side. 

The discovery of lyrium and its applications in translating matter from one side of the veil to the other had changed everything. The first few experiments had -- perhaps inevitably -- come to tragic and gruesome conclusions, but with the promise of an open galaxy at their fingertips, humanity persevered. Travel through the Fade became possible, but incredibly risky, with more expeditions ending in bloody failure than success. Despite all their efforts it seemed impossible to determine where the danger was coming from until, by chance or design, one of the experimental crews sent into the Fade included an esper. 

Where most people perceived only formless, chaotic colors and shifting shapes in the Fade, an esper saw entire fantastic landscapes populated by even more fantastic inhabitants: some benign, many hostile. For while the material realm was one of mass and energy, the Fade was a dimension of thought and perception, and _only_ an esper could navigate it safely. 

Espers -- also commonly known as _psychics_ , _paths_ , or _mindstealers_ \-- were a tiny fragment of the population mostly pushed to the fringes by their mundane brethren. With this discovery their prominence shifted radically, as they alone possessed the keys to safely traveling the stars. Every ship that traversed the Fade, by necessity, carried at least one esper among its crew; attempting to traverse the Fade without one was tantamount to suicide.

In theory that ought to have made espers a valuable commodity, valued specialists who could name their price in response to demand. In some areas of the galaxy -- such as the systems controlled by the Tevinter Consortium, dominated by whole corporation-clans of psionic shipping barons -- that was true. But in the Andrastean Federation, formed in no small part as a backlash to the excesses of the old Tevinter Imperium, conditions were very much the opposite. 

In the Federation -- or in the systems which, while not directly under the authority of the Council of Song, were still under their cultural hegemony -- espers were a resource to be controlled and exploited. The mundane populace was taught to fear and despise them, the order of the Templars was created to counter and corral them. The Doctrine of Song taught that every esper was a criminal in the making, a thief or rapist-potential just waiting for an opening to strike. Any impulse to help or be kind to an esper was assumed to be the false result of psychic influence rather than true thought. 

It wasn't that such abuses _never_ happened, Hawke knew. Fenris was walking, emphatic proof of that. But most of the espers Hawke had known (including, of course, the one he had taken as a pilot and a lover) were just ordinary people at heart, just wanting to live and work and love freely and in peace. 

He knew _why_ it happened. The Federation depended on their stable of captive espers to pilot their fleet of ships, provide them with transport from one system to another. To maintain their power and dominance they had to keep espers controlled, isolated and dehumanized, and had spent a hundred years and incalculable amounts of money and effort on a propaganda campaign carefully calculated to do just that. It was all about power -- political, cultural, economic, and religious -- and they would go to any lengths to maintain that power. Any lengths at all. 

That was just the way it was. And short of a political upheaval the likes of which the galaxy hadn't seen in centuries -- the Federation being conquered by the Imperium or the Qunari, or a mass revolt on the part of the espers -- that was the way it would continue to be. Anders talked occasionally about the possibility of an esper rebellion, the conditions and events that would have to spark a revolution, but there was more yearning to his words than any real hope. 

Hawke wished there was something he could do to address that yearning, but he was only one man. One man didn't have much chance of changing a galaxy -- so instead he tried to do the things that a man could do for his lover, soothing him after the night terrors, holding him through the fits of rage and despair and tears, providing cocoa and backrubs and bad classic movies cuddled on the couch. 

And stuffies. 

It had turned into a ritual between them. The hour they finally cleared the system limit, Hawke made his way down to the Fade bridge with a new offering firmly in hand. He'd picked it up on Kirkwall Station, an off-the-manifest purchase he made before every new journey that required time in the Fade. 

He stopped by the door of the Fade Bridge -- closed, but not locked according to the status lights on the door panel -- and knocked. "It's open, come on in," Anders called through the door, but it slid open the next moment on his slightly out-of-breath self. 

Hawke smiled, but made no move to enter. The Fade Bridge, alone of all the places on the ship, was Anders' private retreat. Like the engineering room was for Fenris or the main bridge was for himself, it was a place that Anders could make his own without regard for the taste or comfort of others. That much was apparent in the décor Hawke could see past Anders' shoulder -- bright squashy furniture, actual _cat wallpaper_ interspersed with art of cats and other ancient Earth creatures in eye-searing colors. There was a holotank, originally meant to simulate aquariums, which an easy mod had turned into shining kittens endlessly chasing each other in play. There was music playing in the background, a soothing electronic medley that Hawke knew would have bored him out of his skull within an hour but which Anders liked. 

"We're past the system limit?" Anders asked -- rhetorically, since he got the same navigation ship alerts that Hawke did. The fact that he was down in the Fade Bridge, going through his preparations, was proof of that. 

Hawke nodded anyway. "We're transitioning in under an hour," he said. "I thought I'd stop by to make sure you had everything you need… and give you this for good luck." He produced the plush toy from out behind his back, holding it through the door. 

Anders laughed in delight as he took it. Like all the rest of Anders' peculiar favorites, it was an ancient Earth animal -- this time a strange aquatic beast called an _octopus,_ which had no legs or feet but eight boneless, curling arms. 

"What, not a kitten this time?" Anders teased as he examined the doll from all angles, uncoiling the tentacles to give them an experimental waggle. 

"Cats apparently aren't that popular on Kirkwall," Hawke said wryly. "I thought I'd try something new." 

Anders smiled at him, and leaned over the toy octopus to kiss him, cupping his cheek gently with one hand as their lips met and warmed on each other. "Thank you," he said. "I'll keep it safe. To answer your question, yes, I'm fully prepped and ready to go. Now, you'd better run along to the main bridge to get ready for transition." 

Hawke nodded, not without reluctance as he stepped back and the door to the bridge slid shut.

He swung by Engineering on his way back to the main bridge, sticking his head in through the hatch and ignoring the swoopy, disorienting feeling of being half-in and half-out of a null-g field. "Hey there, Fenris," he called out, catching a glimpse of the elf's silhouette further into the bay. "Everything okay down here? Got everything you need?" 

There was a clank, and Fenris swung himself around gracefully into Hawke's line of sight, pulling himself around to face Hawke right-side up. "What, no stuffed animal toys for _me_ before every transition?" the elf demanded. Given his deadpan expression, it was sometimes hard to tell when Fenris was teasing. 

Hawke smiled. "Well, I didn't think you wanted one, but if you say so for next time…" 

Fenris snorted. "No thank you. We waste enough storage space housing those abominations as it is," he said. "I do not require such childish coddling. And honestly, Hawke, neither does he." 

"They don't take up all that much space, really," Hawke protested, ignoring the other accusation. "Every year or so he gives them away to charities on whatever station we pass by, and you know it." This was not entirely true; there were a few that remained through every transition, including Mr. Wiggums -- the rather ugly and bedraggled stuffed cat that was the first gift Hawke had ever given to Anders, and which remained in its cubby in their sleeping cabin. 

Fenris rolled his eyes, but did not pursue the topic. "The lyriad drive is primed and ready to go, all monitors are in the green," he said. "All our fluid levels are at optimum, and the drive itself is at maximum charge." 

Hawke nodded. "All right. I'm headed up to the main flight bridge now." 

"I await your word," Fenris said. He pushed off from his perch, and sailed back into the bowels of Engineering. 

It was all very standard, very routine, so there was no explanation for the way Hawke's step -- and his heartbeat -- quickened as he made his way up to the bridge. There was nothing to get excited about, he told his traitorous adrenal system sternly. It was just another jump. Another day, another job, another dive through the fabric of reality itself to traverse a completely alien dimension hovering at the limits of human comprehension, skipping across gulfs of space so vast that the light from some of the younger stars had never had time to cross it yet. Nothing remarkable at all. 

Fuck, he loved his job. 

Of course, for all that, his own part in this dance was a very minor one. Hawke secured himself in the main bridge, acutely conscious of the empty seats on either side of him, and ran down a final systems check. Destination, itinerary, supplies, permits… everything was in order. He engaged the safety field on the captain's chair, and opened the all-ship's comm. system. 

"Main Bridge to Engineering," he called into the speaker. "This is the captain. We are preparing for transition. Are we green to go?" 

It was entirely redundant, since he'd just been down to check in person; but like the pre-transition checklists, it was safer to repeat things a dozen times than to miss them even once. Fenris' voice returned from the speaker, smooth and calm. "Aye, Captain," he said. "All systems go." 

"Main Bridge to Fade Bridge; are you prepared to assume control?" 

"Aye, Captain," Anders' lighter voice replied from the comm. "Fade Bridge is standing by." 

Hawke keyed the countdown on his console. "Transition on my mark," he said, and waited while the numbers counted down. 

When the count hit zero, he felt the shuddering hum of previously inert machinery come alive; kilometers of circuitry not only in the drive room but all throughout the ship, embedded into the walls. There was a brief moment where he could almost see the swiftly-expanding shimmer, as the lyrium field unfolded around the ship and extended into empty space in every direction -- and then… 

The universe seemed to freeze and crystallize like glass -- for an instant Hawke could see through the walls of his ship as though they were transparent, ever chamber and corridor on his ship and beyond, but instead of empty space it was an endless fractal replica of the same rooms and hallways over and over again, repeated and altered and distorted out of all reckoning. He was split, divided in two places at once -- or perhaps two hundred, or more, or -- 

Then things snapped back into place. He was back in the captain's chair on the main bridge, shivering slightly. The ship's lighting had shifted to a green color, a warning to all aboard that they were in the Fade, and to take all necessary precautions. 

The communications channel was turned off, although Hawke hadn't closed it; with barely a bit of fumbling he flipped it open again and cleared his throat. "Report?" he called out. 

"Captain, this is engineering," Fenris' voice replied. As always, he sounded a little strained; entering the Fade was always rougher on him than either of the others. "The lyriad drive is active, and we are in the Fade." 

"Thank you." Hawke switched over to the other channel. "Fade Bridge, this is Main Bridge; you have control." 

"Assuming control, Captain," Anders replied, and Hawke had no idea how he could sound so calm. 

After all, they had just set foot into a dreamworld. The Fade was psychically reactive; it responded to human thoughts and emotions, images and fears and fantasies. This was a place where dreams could, quite literally, come true. A place where a million miles of empty space could be crossed in the blink of an eye, merely by wishing it.

That was why the Fade so valuable. And that was exactly why it was so dangerous. 

 

* * *

 

They spent the next four days in the Fade. Aside from the green-tinged light that warned them against taking any actions that might interfere with the lyrium field, nothing else had overtly changed on board; as long as Hawke didn't think too hard about it, he wouldn't have even known the difference. Ship's life went on as usual, with all of the usual diversions: they ate, exercised, had sex, burned away time with books or videos, and slept. 

Or at least, Hawke and Fenris did all of the usual things. Anders did none of them, with the exception of eating. 

One of the earliest lessons humanity learned about Fade navigation was that so long as the esper pilot was in control, they _must_ remain awake at all times. The ship's safety and smooth passage depended entirely on the esper's focus and clarity; dropping into REM sleep inevitably invited catastrophe. Awake, a trained esper could deal with the local denizens of the Fade to avoid conflict -- usually -- and negotiate peaceful passage; but if they slept, even so much as a doze, the benign entities of the Fade could turn hostile on them in the the blink of a drowsy eye. 

To stay awake and lucid for such a long period of time, pilots invariably took stimulants. There was really no other way around it. There were safe, non-addictive stims on the market for just that purpose which claimed to have no unpleasant side effects, but that only applied to the drug itself -- the toll sleep deprivation took on the human body was as unavoidable as it was unpleasant. It was hard, grueling work, and easy to understand why not every esper that was capable of Fade piloting was in a hurry to do it. 

In the Andrastean systems, they weren't given a choice. Espers there were identified, interned, and kept isolated in creaky old slow-turning space stations known as the Circles. There they were trained rigorously and put to work piloting starships for the Federation; it was, literally, the only legal role for an esper in the Federation to have. Any esper caught off of a Federation ship, outside the supervision of a Templar, was considered 'rogue' and dealt with accordingly. 

Hawke had never been on a Federation ship, but heard stories from his father: hair-raising accounts of espers piloting from glass booths open to the gaze of dozens of watchers, elaborate restraints, cocktails of stimulants and paralytics forced involuntarily into espers' bloodstream to keep them awake and yet unable to fight or resist. Every now and again Anders would drop comments that chilled Hawke's blood; casual remarks about mornings with Hawke and Fenris being "a better way to wake up than a kick to the head," or off-color jokes about electric shocks being used "in a not so fun way." It seemed sheer madness to Hawke to abuse the very people you had no choice but to entrust your lives to in the Fade, yet there it was. The scars above Anders' elbow, the scars above his stomach -- round divots of flesh where needles and tubes had been pushed through the skin for hours or days at a time -- told all the stories that he never spoke of aloud. 

Comments like these, stories like the ones his father used to tell were what put the sick unease in Hawke's stomach every time they went into the Fade. He knew, logically speaking, that the arrangement was not the same. Anders was not a prisoner on the Lady Amell, not a conscript: he could stay or go as he pleased, and so far it pleased him to stay. He never complained about piloting -- well, that wasn't quite true, he complained near-constantly, but he never seemed to actually want to _stop_. The ship's Fade Bridge had been outfitted for his comfort; no restraints, no shocks, no watching Templars, just kitten prints and comfy cushions and all the fruit snacks he wanted. It wasn't the same, it _wasn't_ the same, but Hawke couldn't make his stomach believe that. 

On the fourth day -- the day they were scheduled to arrive -- Hawke looked down at a buzz on his mobile communicator, signaling a message from the ship's communicator. Frowning, he turned it on; it was a basic text-format message. 

 _Unavoidable delay. New ETA: 13m003d40._  

That was all, but it was signed with a familiar code; Anders had sent it from the Fade bridge. Short as it was, it contained more than enough for Hawke to worry about. The new arrival date had been pushed back not only till tomorrow, but to the day after tomorrow. That would be nearly six days of straight piloting for Anders. 

He sent back a reply text: _everything OK down there?_  

No response. 

A worried frown still on his face, Hawke made his way down to the Fade Bridge, and pressed the hail button on the outside panel. "Anders? It's me," he said into the speaker. 

Still no response. 

Now he was more than just a little worried. Anders got like this, sometimes, especially when he was in a mood, refusing all attempts at communication. This could just be that… or there _could_ be something horribly wrong in there. With a sigh, Hawke entered his superadmin override into the lock, and slid open the door. 

The walls of the Fade Bridge, under the kitten print and posters, were set with panels embedded with lyrium circuitry; active now, it cast a queer blue glow over the space that melded with the green ship's lighting to create an almost aquatic effect. Anders, his headset on, was pacing a short circuit around the couch, occasionally muttering or making gestures in response to something Hawke couldn't see. 

All a non-esper could ever really see of the Fade was indistinct, shifting landscapes of color; Anders, Hawke knew, saw something very different. He'd tried to describe it a few times, but a language developed for this universe didn't really have the right concepts for it; and the strange jargon Fade pilots had developed to use with each other didn't really mean anything to anything but them. As Hawke watched, an orb of blue pulsing light slowly separated from the wall panel and ghosted into the room, hovering a few feet away from Anders. 

Anders turned and saw Hawke in the doorway. "Oh, it's you," he said, not sounding particularly pleased. "Garrett, I love you dearly, but this is not exactly a good time." 

"I'm sorry to disturb you," Hawke said cautiously. "I saw the notification you sent..." 

"Yes, and?" Anders said impatiently. The blue orb butted around his shoulder like a friendly animal, and Anders swatted it away with a scowl. 

Four sleepless days was having its usual effect on Anders' temper, Hawke saw. He decided to get right to the point. "There's a delay?" 

"Yes, that's what my note said. Congratulations on achieving basic reading skills," Anders said with a sarcastic drawl. 

Now that was just uncalled for. Hawke bit his tongue on a more heated reply, instead simply asking, "What's happening?" 

Anders let out a loud, aggrieved sigh, turning back to one of the wall panels. He reached out to punch a sequence of keys, the emphatic motions almost but not-quite disguising the slight tremor in them. "There's a harmonics disturbance in the regions we were going to pass through," he said, every word dragged out of him unwillingy. "I had to chart another route around, and it's going to add another forty hours onto our trip. But we'll _get there."_  

"Forty hours?!" Hawke nearly choked. 

 _"Yes._ " 

Hawke took a deep breath. "Love, that's well over our initial deadline. You'll have been going for nearly six days straight!"

"I'm aware of that," Anders grated. His eyes were bloodshot almost all the way through, dark bags under the eyelids that only added emphasis to his glare. 

"We don't have to do this," Hawke coaxed him. "We can drop out of the Fade now, let you rest, and take the rest of it in another smaller jump. This is too long." 

"Two Fade jumps would more than double our running costs for this trip," Anders argued. "And we have no idea what the profits are even going to be. If it's a bust, then we'll have wasted two trips' worth of lyrium on nothing." 

Hawke set his jaw. "That's a risk I'm willing to take," he said. 

"Well, I'm not!" Anders snapped. His hands were nearly white-knuckled on the edge of the bar. "I can _do_ this."

"Love, please. I'm worried about you --" Hawke tried, but Anders cut him off mid-sentence. 

"Don't coddle me!" Anders' voice rose dangerously. "I know what I'm doing. Do you think I'm some fragile damsel? I've done longer runs than this before. Now fuck off -- I'm trying to do my job here, and I don't need you staring at me like a bug under glass!" 

It was the 'bug under glass' comment, more than anything else, that did it; Anders was in no mood to be persuaded, and Hawke's attempt to show concern was just making things worse. He relented with a sigh, backing out of the Fade Bridge and letting the door slide shut.

 

* * *

 

Somewhat troubled, Hawke went looking for his other lover. A quick check of Engineering did not turn him up -- Hawke remembered, after the fact, that Fenris spent less time in Engineering when they were in the Fade. He couldn't do repairs or upgrades while they were in transit, so there was little reason to be there outside of an emergency. 

There weren't many other places that Fenris could be -- Hawke checked in their sleeping cabin, then in the other empty cabin that they occasionally used when they had passengers or just wanted some space. No elf. 

Third try was the charm; Fenris was in the lounge, the long room adjacent to the gallery where they stored and watched most entertainment. He was standing by the holo player with a reader in his hand, flicking through the library and looking rather glum. 

Hawke came up beside him and draped his arm over Fenris' shoulders, pressing a kiss to his white hair. "Hello there," he said, and Fenris hm'd in response. "What are you watching?" 

"Nothing." Fenris put the reader back in its place with a scowl. "There is nothing worth watching. Anders filled up the entire incoming queue with episodes of that ridiculous cartoon bear show he watches, and we won't be able to get anything new until we return to normal space." 

He turned in Hawke's arms and leaned up for a kiss, going up on his tip toes for a moment. When he sank back down, his expression was sober. "How is he?" 

No need to ask who 'he' was, in this context. "Cranky. The usual," he said. "You know how piloting gets him. We're looking at a forty-hour delay." 

Fenris nodded, accepting the news without argument. Hawke sighed, letting some of his frustration and hurt at Anders' rejection come to the surface. "He's being a stubborn asshole, honestly," he said. "I tried to encourage him to break the fade walk, take a rest and travel the rest of the way in a second jump, but he refuses." 

"Typical," Fenris snorted. "But he is doing what he thinks is best for all of us, Hawke. You should trust him in this." 

"I know, I do," Hawke protested. "I just don't like to see him hurting." 

Fenris shrugged a little. "Pain is part of the life that we live," he said dismissively. "We're grown men, we can bear a little discomfort." 

Hawke frowned, leaning back a little to look Fenris up and down. "Your implants are bothering you again, aren't they?" It was a rhetorical question; his implants always bothered him more in the Fade. The lyrium embedded in the bio-machinery made him one of the best engineers Hawke had ever known, but it had an unfortunate tendency to resonate in proximity with lyrium. In the Fade, that translated to a steady low-grade vibration constantly drilling in his bones. It was worse in close proximity to the lyriad drive, which was why Fenris tended to avoid the engine bay when they were in transit. 

Fenris shrugged again, but avoided his eyes, which was confirmation enough to people who knew him. Hawke kissed him again, then tugged at his arms, leading him over towards one of the couches. "Here… let's sit and see if I can help."

"I'm fine," Fenris protested, although he let himself be herded. "I don't need coddling..."

Hawke rolled his eyes. "What is with the two of you and 'coddling?' " he demanded. "If someone loves you, and cares about you, and wants to help you, then there's nothing wrong with just accepting that." 

Fenris didn't look entirely convinced, but he stopped protesting and let Hawke settle him on the cushions. "If you say so." 

"I do." Hawke made sure he was comfortable, a pillow behind his head and under his knees, and pulled Fenris' feet up on his lap. The elf wasn't wearing shoes -- he almost never did, on ship or station -- and Hawke was able to push his leggings up to his knees. He slid his hands over Fenris' lower legs, kneading calf and ankle, before he settled in to rub his feet. 

This was a routine that Hawke knew well. The trick to distracting Fenris from his implants with massage was always to sink in to a layer below his skin and stay there, keeping the other's attention away from the surface. He pressed this thumbs deeply into the soles of Fenris' feet, rolling his ankles as he did to loosen them. Fenris slid a few more inches down the pillow, and let out a happy groan. 

It felt good to see him happy, to see the blissed-out expression on his face as he melted into the couch. His silver hair spread out in a corona around his head, always shimmering faintly in the ship's lights. Fenris always looked so much smaller when he was out of Engineering, or anywhere in full gravity; he never really looked at home as much as he did in freefall.

Hawke loved watching Fenris in freefall, as crude and clumsy as it made him feel in comparison. The other man was a picture of grace, a breath of poetry in motion. He moved in zero-g like he had been born to it -- and in a very real sense, he had.  
  
Modern elves invariably traced their descent from the Third Wave -- that mysterious group of early colonists that had left old Earth and cut off contact entirely, building a society of gargantuan stations and floating castles in the deep reaches of space. Generations of deep-space living had changed their descendents; thinner and lighter bones, eyes adapted to a different range of electromagnetic radiation, elongated ears and lengthened limbs.  
  
Were the changes were deliberate or incidental? What other physical changes might have taken root in the great cathedral vaults of the skies? No one knew, least of all the elves themselves. Their floating citadels were struck, one and all, by some great catastrophe that left them time-frozen in space, cold moribund hulks of twisted, brittle metal. No one knew how; no one knew why. The fall of Arlathan was relegated to a fable, a relic that haunted ghost stories and cautionary tales.  
  
A bare handful of the elves had escaped to take shelter on nearby planets, and the survivors of Arlathan had barely begun to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives before another, more inexorable fate overtook them. The greatest tragedy of the elves was that the loss of their celestial home coincided with the rise of the old Tevinter Imperium. The rapid, voracious expansion of that empire had swallowed up all but a few of the survivors -- and, finding themselves in possession of a displaced, impoverished population with no kin or allies to come to their aid, readily turned them into slaves.  
  
The old Tevinter magisters had been more fond than most of genetic experimentation, and the elves made ideal guinea pigs and culture dishes for their vile experiments. One of the first things they had done with the elves was cut down their size, apparently for no better reason than they preferred to tower over their slaves. The fabled height of the original elves could now only be seen in the Dalish, the tiny minority of elves that has escaped Tevinter domination and roamed the starways in their battered flotilla of spacecraft. 

But that hadn't been the only change the old Tevinters made, not by a long shot. They tinkered and tested and toyed with their subjects until, after over a hundred years of modifications, they proudly announced to the universe that they had created the perfect slave race: an entire race of people who were inherently, genetically subservient, who _wanted_ to be enslaved.  
  
The Tevinter Imperium might be called the Tevinter Consortium now, forced after centuries of conflict to abandon their unchecked aggression and most blatant offenses against their equally-powerful neighbors -- but for the elves of Tevinter, not much had changed. Modern, liberal-minded Tevinters now appeared on video to argue that as much as they might _want_ to emancipate the elves, they simply _couldn't_ , that it would be cruel and negligent to turn their biologically docile dependents out into the world where they would be constitutionally unable to fend for themselves.  
  
Personally, Hawke would have liked nothing more than to lock some of these so-called 'Tevinter liberals' in a room with Fenris for half an hour: any that survived the experience would come out of it with no more illusions about the "submissive, docile" nature of the elves. Biological predisposition could kiss his hairy human ass: it was 90% social conditioning, he was sure.  
  
And the rest -- well, an empire whose slaveholding elite mostly consisted of powerful, amoral _telepaths_ hardly need reach for an explanation for the rest. 

Fenris made a small, discomforted sound and shifted position; Hawke realized with a start that he was letting his moodiness leak, and was squeezing too hard. He quickly lightened up, petting the bony tops of Fenris' feet in wordless apology, and Fenris settled down again. He looked half-asleep already, lids heavy over brilliant green eyes. 

"Have you been sleeping ok?" Hawke asked. Bad enough that one of his lovers should be going without sleep without the other following suit. "You were already gone when I woke up." 

"I slept enough," Fenris said with a small shrug. 

He was silent for several long moments before he spoke again. "It is … still strange to me, to sleep while in the Fade. Danarius did not pilot often. He considered it menial, beneath him. But when he did, he had me attend on him for the entire duration." 

Hawke felt his heart squeeze in his chest, but he kept his voice steady. "That sounds… harsh." 

"At the time I was happy to do it. Grateful to be allowed to be in his presence. Honored to be allowed to witness his great power. I was..." Fenris had a faraway look in his eyes, drifting back into his memories; from the expression on his face, the tightness in his jaw, they were not happy ones. "My own comfort, even my own bodily needs -- I never thought of them, never even _felt_ them, thinking only what he _allowed_ me to think --" His voice cracked, and he broke off.

Hawke slid Fenris' feet back onto the couch and scooted over, laying down on the couch so that his body was aligned with his lover. "That wasn't the real you. You know that," he said. He took one of Fenris' hands in his own, raised it to kiss the fingers, then squeezed encouragingly. "And you don't have to be there any more, not even in your head." 

Fenris let out a soft sigh, and leaned fully against Hawke. Hawke shifted himself around, not without some awkwardness, until he was flat on his back on the couch with the smaller man on top. He gathered Fenris onto his chest, threaded their fingers together, and just held him. 

They spent a long time cuddling -- Hawke didn't have a clock in his line of sight, but he thought over an hour -- but eventually their minds began to drift towards steamier things. Fenris turned his head so that his lips could meet Hawke's, and the kiss grew more vigorous and heated until Fenris began to get a cramp in his neck from the awkward angle. 

The elf rolled over, his face just inches from Hawke's and their bodies pressed together, and dove back into the kiss. Hawke raised a hand to grasp the back of Fenris' head, his other hand creeping down to squeeze Fenris' ass through the leggings; encouraged by the pressure, Fenris began to grind his hips against Hawke's -- 

Just as things were starting to get really interesting, all hell broke loose. 

A strident alarm blared out over the all-ship's comm., followed by the lighting turning from Fade-green to a lurid red. Hawke lurched upright, knocking his head against Fenris' chin and accidentally dumping his boyfriend off his lap. "What in the Maker's --" 

The all-hands alarm indicated that they should find a secure handhold and brace for impact, but there was no time for either of them to get anywhere; the lurch that wracked the ship threw Hawke onto the floor beside Fenris. He had a moment's wild, careening vision of a vast grotesque silhouette moving against a stygian darkness, a seething kaleidoscope of legs and eyes, before the vision popped like a soap bubble. 

Hawke lay on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling, and swallowed hard. The alarm had stopped. A moment later, the lights blinked from red back to their normal off-white. 

"Kaffas," Fenris groaned, sitting up. He felt at his jaw, but apparently had picked up no other bruises in his tumble. "I swear, the damn 'path did that on purpose." 

Hawke groaned, slamming his head back against the carpet. "You know he wouldn't do that," he said tiredly. "We're back in normal space. Something must have gone wrong." 

"You don't say?" Fenris glared, even as he picked himself up off the floor. He held out a hand for Hawke, hauling the larger man to his feet with little apparent effort despite his slight stature. 

"Well, the alarm's off, so we're not in imminent danger of dying," Hawke said, stumbling slightly as he regained his balance. "Let's go see Anders and find out what happened."

Fenris agreed. "And where -- in all the known or unknown galaxy -- we are now."

 

* * *

  

~tbc...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not gonna lie, cranky!Anders in this chapter is largely based on me when I'm having a bad day at work.
> 
> Did you notice the chapter count keeps changing? That's because I'm utterly incapable of judging how many words it takes to actually cover things. The next chapter was originally meant to be part of this one, but it got too long. Tune in next time...


	4. Deep Space

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took longer than I expected for two reasons. First reason: it kept getting _longer._ To think I initially envisioned this as a quick, one-scene interlude at the end of chapter 3. Yeah... that didn't happen.
> 
> The second reason is that World of Warcraft: Legion came out last week. Sorry guys.

 

By unspoken agreement, Fenris and Hawke headed first to the Fade Bridge. The door was unlocked, a number of amber indicators showing on the panel outside -- indicating that the systems were, though not critical, in need of attention. While Hawke hesitated outside the door, Fenris pushed it open and went right in.

Anders was sitting on one of the couches, knees spread apart, head drooping. The wire headset was held loosely in one hand, and the other was pressed to his face. When he lifted his head, Hawke could see that he was pressing a wad of tissues to his upper lip, a red stain slowly creeping across it from his nose. 

"Yeah, I know," Anders sighed as the two of them approached, before either of them had a chance to speak. 

"Anders, are you all right?" Hawke asked, worry clutching in his chest. 

Anders waved the question away with the hand holding the headset. "I'm fine," he said, although around the tissue it came out a bit stuffy. "Tired, mind-burnt, with a searing headache and a crick in my neck, but fine." 

Hawke let himself be mollified that, at least a little. So long as Anders was still complaining, he was probably telling the truth; it was when he stopped complaining that they really had to worry.

Fenris got straight to business. "What happened?" he asked. 

Anders shuddered slightly and closed his eyes. "It was a nightmare," he said. 

Fenris tsked. "Come, Anders, there's no need to be so dramatic," he chided.

Anders opened his eyes to glare at Fenris, and took the tissue away from his face to better reply. "No, I mean it was an actual nightmare," he said. "As in, the thing that forced us to drop out of the fade. A category 5 malicious harmonic disruption, or in real-people words, a _nightmare_. I got wind of it from further out and thought I could chart around it, but it kept changing position. By the time I realized it was actually coming after the Lady Amell, it was nearly on top of us.

"If I'd been fresh, then maybe... but there was no way I was going to be able to handle it. Even if by some miracle I could, I would have been in no shape to keep going for another thirty-plus hours afterwards." He wiped away another trickle of blood. "So I pulled the lever."

Fenris nodded. "Sensible," he said, "if cowardly." 

Anders glared at him again. Hawke intervened. "I know you made the right call for all of us, Anders," he said.

"I never said he did not," Fenris said. 

"Any idea where we are now?" Hawke asked Anders. 

The esper spread his free hand as if to encompass the entire breadth of the galaxy, then sighed. "Somewhere in between the Maia Cluster and the Serpent Nebula?" he said. "Nowhere near civilization, that's all I can tell you." 

"You'd best get down to Engineering to make sure nothing was damaged in the crash transition," Hawke suggested to Fenris, who nodded and ducked out the door without further delay. He looked at Anders. "And I'd better get up to the main bridge and resume control." 

"You could have done that first," Anders grumbled; still cranky, although the manic edge was gone from his voice. "I would have been fine." 

Hawke put his hands on Anders' shoulders, stilling him. "I had to see for myself to be sure," he said. "Are we safe here? Do you sense anything -- any DMAs in this area?" 

Anders didn't answer for a moment, his eyes going distant; what was he seeing? Hearing? Hawke couldn't imagine, and Anders never said, being even more closed-mouth about Specialist abilities than his esper abilities. "No," he said. "Too much light, wherever we are. Not enough shadow for them. I don't sense anything nearby." 

Hawke nodded, and leaned in to lay a gentle kiss on his forehead. "Get some rest." 

Anders' sharp golden eyes softened, and his pale lips even quirked in a smile as he looked up from between Hawke's arms. "No chance of that just yet," he said. "I've got another four hours on my current dose before I can even _think_ of sleep. But I'll take advantage of the quiet, anyway." 

Hawke nodded, and gave him one more kiss, letting it linger. Not until he stepped out into the corridor and let the door slide shut behind him did he hurry.

 

* * *

  

By the time Hawke made it up to the main bridge, the first report from Engineering was already at his console; just a preliminary sweep of the most vital systems, assuring the captain that nothing was about to explode. Further information trickled in as Fenris continued his investigations, and Hawke kept an eye on it as he started up the normal-space navigation and propulsion systems and had the sensors conduct their first sweep of the surrounding area. 

Wherever they were, it wasn't within at least a hundred light-years of settled space; no man-made signals were being picked up by the ship's sensors at all. To some extent, where they were in relation to the rest of the galaxy was irrelevant -- if there was nothing in local space to either colonize or monetize, then there was little reason to linger. But until they knew their starting point, they wouldn't be able to return to the Fade. 

The problem with space was this: it was big. Even with Fade-walking capability, which allowed humanity to cheat the laws of physics when moving from one space to another, there was simply far more out there than humanity had ever been (and probably _would ever_ be) able to chart. 

Nor was it as simple as finding your location in reference to known landmarks: once off Earth, the stars didn't hold the same patterns and relations to each other. It was possible for a sufficiently powerful astrography computer to make an estimate, but they'd need to move far enough from their starting location to get enough triangulation points. 

Hawke set all the external scanners in motion, pulling up the results tables side by side in his viewscreen to try to piece together their location. Somewhat to his surprise they started pinging with results almost immediately; instead of the expected empty kilometers in space in every direction, the scanners were detecting solid objects nearby. Lots of them. Some of them less than a hundred kilometers out. 

He called up a three-dimensional holo of the space surrounding the _Lady Amell_ and watched as it slowly populated with clutter. Rocks of various sizes, chunks of ice, pools of liquid gasses… all fairly typical space junk, but what was it doing here? 

As the other scan results of the local star maps began to filter in, he found an answer, or at least a theory. They were in a space eddy, a confluence of gravitational waves and troughs caused by planetary objects in close conjunction. "Close" being a relative word, of course -- the nearest stars were still thousands of kilometers away -- but nonetheless close enough to exert their weight on the fabric of space. This must be a star cluster, a collection of young suns just starting to form out of local gas and dust; too young to form proper planets, the rejected material was pushed around by conflicting gravitational pulls until it settled into a sort of trough in local space. 

Hawke picked a trajectory out of the debris field -- more or less at random, since there was no specific destination they had to get to -- and began to plot a course that would avoid collision with any objects. It was harder than it should have been; the space eddy was chock full of chunks of ice and rock, packed closer together than anything Hawke had seen outside of a planetary grav well. It looked almost like those old, twenty-century depictions of "asteroid fields," which anyone who'd actually spent time in space knew were nonsense. Still, there was enough space between the asteroids for their small ship to slip through with room to spare. 

As he eased the ship forward on its new course, a light began blinking on his console. A comm call from the Fade Bridge; not the red or yellows of an urgent call, but merely an indication that the person on the other end wanted to talk. Hawke smiled, and hit the button to accept the call. "Fade Bridge, this is the Captain." 

 _"Garrett,"_ Anders' voice said from the other end, soft and tired yet still warm. His image didn't fill the holotank, which was still devoted to the local map of space. 

"All right, love?" Hawke asked him. "Need anything?" 

 _"Getting there. And no, I have everything I need. I just wanted to… talk for a bit, if I won't be distracting you."_  

"Not at all," Hawke said. "I'm glad you're feeling better." 

A sigh. _"Me too,"_ Anders admitted. _"I wanted to apologize for how I treated you earlier -- when you came down to check on me. I was being an ass, and you didn't deserve that."_  

"It was nothing," Hawke said, though he was secretly pleased to receive the apology. Anders could be vicious when he was in a bad mood, but he always recognized afterwards when he had crossed a line and did his best to make amends for it. Apology received, he made an effort to change the conversation before Anders got himself stuck in a guilt spiral. "We should have a triangulation soon, that will give us a general idea of where we are. Some kind of space eddy, that's all I can say yet." 

" _What's it look like out there?"_ Anders asked, accepting the redirect. 

"Messy," Hawke said. "Reminds me of Carver's room when we were kids." He adjusted course slightly, arcing around a lazily rotating hunk of rock. "A real junkyard. Actually, this place more than anything reminds me of the Trenches back on Kirkwall." The place where he had raced for and won the prize that had lifted his family out of poverty, and paid for the _Lady Amell._  

Anders laughed. " _It's a dump, and you're saying it reminds you of Kirkwall?"_  

"Well, Kirkwall _is_ a dump. You lived there; are you going to try to tell me otherwise?" Hawke defended his analogy. 

A new meteoroid swam into view on his screen, and Hawke frowned as his attention was caught by it. Something about the shape wasn't quite right… no, the shape was normal enough; spherical, as all objects in null-gee tended to be without any outside interference. It was the _texture_ which was strange; it was perfectly smooth, almost polished-looking. Space was a rough place, and in a cluttered field like this one every object should be suffering a few scrapes and bashes -- but this surface was flawless. 

Unnaturally so. Could this be something artificial? Some kind of satellite or capsule? They were a long way from human settlements, but the Qunari had proven that humans weren't the only sentient race in the galaxy. "That's strange," Hawke murmured, even as he leaned in to adjust the sensors for a wider angle.

 _"What's strange?"_ Anders wanted to know. 

Now that he knew what to look for, there were several of the possibly-artificial objects scattered among the field, the one he'd spotted first being the biggest. Hawke's curiosity grew. "Not sure," he said absently into the comm. On impulse, he adjusted the _Lady Amell's_ course to pass closer to the smooth sphere, close enough to bring his more powerful scanners to bear. If this _was_ an artificially created object -- a machine, capsule or satellite -- then it could be valuable. Maybe they could make use of this unplanned pit stop, turn a profit out of misfortune. "I'm going to take a closer look." 

_"A closer look at what? What are you looking at?  Are you doing something reckless again?"_

His curiosity was engaged now; Hawke ignored his lover's warnings as he maneuvered the ship around with a deft touch. Decelerating to a rest barely a hundred meters away from the surface of the strange object, Hawke flipped on the ship's scanners and trained them on the smooth surface. 

The moment the first scan touched the surface, all hell broke loose. The deceptively smooth surface shattered -- split like a melon rind -- giving a glimpse of a churning, chitinous black mass inside. Before Hawke could react, to engage thrusters or even just turn off the sensors, a black torrent of writhing limbs and chattering mandibles exploded in a spray directly against the viewscreen. 

For all the boil of movement the attack had been silent, soundless -- until the first of them hit the ship. Then he could hear, then he could _feel_ the crunch and grind of claws and teeth against the hull, feel the ship shudder and rock with the weight and impact of each new attack. 

 _"Garrett, what's wrong? What's happening up there?"_  

He might have screamed; he couldn't remember, couldn't think past the tidal wave of fear and horror that poured through him. For instant, he _was_ back on Kirkwall -- the deep caves under the surface, hissing and seething with toxic pools, the abnormally round holes in the walls leading off into the sunless depths, whispering and chittering in each shadow they passed -- 

In a panic he jerked back on the throttle, forcing the ship to reverse its course. The vessel jerked and shuddered as it fought its own momentum, listing and out of balance with the new unexpected masses attached to the hull. With the viewscreen covered he couldn't _see_ , but he just had to get away, get _away._  

Another impact rocked the ship, and he dimly realized through his blind panic that he had reversed too far, too fast and without regard to his surroundings; they were blundering about the debris field now, hitting other meteoroids like a cue ball on a pool table. Another teeth-jarring impact, and then the insidious whisper and scrape of more of the things latching on. Those strange white globes had been all over the field, they were everywhere _everywhere_ and he couldn't _see,_ couldn't get away, could escape -- 

 _"Garrett!"_  

All at once, as swiftly as it had come, the choking panic subsided. It was as though a plug had been pulled in his mind, letting the frenzied emotions drain away out the bottom and leaving him shaken, but clear-headed. He stared at the viewscreen, the hideous underside of the monsters as they scraped and scrabbled at the surface of the ship, and felt no more than a mild alarm. Now he was able to recognize -- intellectually -- that they could not break through the surface. They were out there, and he was in here. He was safe. 

For the moment. 

He took a deep breath -- he could do that now, without the crushing fear paralyzing his neck and chest -- and eased up his death-grip on the controls. "Thanks, love," he said, his voice a croak. He _must_ have screamed, although he hadn't heard himself doing it; otherwise Anders wouldn't have known that he needed help. 

The fear, horror and panic were still there in his mind, but muted to a baseline hum; just enough to remind him of their existence, and the need to address what had caused them. But at least now, he could think clearly enough to act on them instead of being overwhelmed. 

 _"It's nothing,"_ Anders said over the comm.. "What's happening? I felt something hit the ship. Are we under attack?" 

 _"What in the cold dark heart of the Void is going on up there?"_ a new voice cut in, and Hawke winced slightly as Fenris' familiar snarl came over the comm.. _"Hawke! If this is the result of your cowboy joyriding -- "_  

Hawke blew out a breath, and flipped the switch to bring them all into a single channel. "Some kind of… creature," he reported. "Local life-form. I must have gotten too close to their eggs, I guess, and they've latched on." 

A stream of Tevene curse words came out from the console. _"I'd say they've latched on. I'm showing two percent degradation of the outer plate layer in the last five minutes! Hawke, they're chewing through the hull!"_  

Cold fingers trickled down Hawke's neck, clenching an icy fist around his heart; the fear reared up in him again for an instant, then subsided just as quickly as Anders made a concerned noise over the channel. He took another breath, then another, making sure his head was steady and clear. "We need to get out of this debris field first," he said, when he was sure his voice was under his control. "Then we can look into mitigation." 

 _"Sooner is better, Hawke_ ," Fenris warned him. " _I'll do what I can, but I can only slow them down. I can't do anything to drive them off from inside the ship."_  

That meant they would have to go EVA. That meant they would have to -- Another crash of fear, just as quickly dispelled. Hawke focused his thoughts on the puzzle in front of him. One step at a time. "Do what you can to buy us time," he said. 

Fenris cursed again, then cut the channel. 

 _"Love? Are you okay?"_ Anders said over the remaining channel. His voice was already beginning to show some strain. 

"I'm fine. Thank you. Thank you so much," Hawke said earnestly. "Just keep doing what you're doing. I need to plot our course out of here, and we're flying blind with these _things_ in our eyes." 

He turned his attention to the computers. Most of the _Lady Amell's_ sensors were blocked, the visuals showing only the gruesome underparts of the space critters assaulting them. But he still had the map of the debris field that his sensors had recorded before the attack, and the logs showed how much their thrusters had fired and in what direction before he panicked. 

Using that information, he calculated their new position, and carefully eased the ship back onto a new course. Building off of the computer's generated course, but keeping an even wider berth from any more of the objects than before, he walked the ship carefully out of the death trap it had landed in. 

It wasn't all smooth sailing. The further they got from their starting point, the rougher their picture of the area became; if he had picked the wrong direction to begin with, it was possible they weren't heading towards an exit at all, but only deeper into the lair. The thought should have terrified him, but he felt only a minor worry.

Nor was it always possible to thread the needle when it came to the debris objects. At one point, despite all his efforts the Lady Amell was forced to pass within five hundred meters of another of the white globes; apparently even that was close enough to trigger their attack, and Hawke winced at the new assault of scrapings and thumpings on their hull. But it couldn't be helped; he stayed focused on pushing them forward. 

Too focused, perhaps; he found himself slipping into an almost hypnotic trance, and shook himself out of it. They were coasting straight, now, without any further warnings or impacts; the rough scan of their local space map indicated that they should be out of the debris field now, out of the danger zone. But with their external scanners covered, there was no way to know that for sure. 

A signal came on his console. Fenris again, this time his personal channel instead of Engineering's. _"Are we there yet?"_ the elf demanded. 

Hawke tried and failed to stifle a laugh; he was a bit punchy, for all Anders could do. "Maker, Fenris, you sound like a little kid on a road trip," he said. 

He could practically hear the roll of Fenris' eyes over the comm.. _"This is no time for your questionable sense of humor, Hawke,"_ Fenris said testily _. "I am standing by to EVA. If we're clear of the debris field, I need to start immediately. Outer hull integrity is already down to 70% in some places."_  

That sobered him. "How long do we have?" he asked. 

 _"Ideally, zero hours to prevent further damage; failing that, about ninety minutes before hull breach occurs. That time window will be extended as we work to clear the source of the damage, but we should not delay even a second."_ There was a pause on the comm. as their engineer allowed that to sink in. _"Captain, are we or are we not in the clear zone?"_  

"We should be," Hawke admitted. "But I can't confirm it without a visual --" 

 _"Which you won't get so long as the externals are compromised."_  

"I could try to reverse the polarization of the decontamination ray -- blast some of them loose from the hull, get at least a good shot," Hawke said, mind racing. 

A snort from the comm.. _"Has that esper addled your wits along with your emotions?"_  

 _"Hey,"_ Anders objected, the only indication that he was listening in.

Fenris ignored him. _"Any burst you could get from that would be far too low-grade to actually affect something strong enough to eat through silicon plating. The only thing you would accomplish would be to permanently fry our demon system, **and** corrode our radiation shield in the process. Forget it. I shall get your visual myself."_  

"Fenris?" Hawke exclaimed, disbelief spiking against the muted background hum of fear. "Fenris, stand down! Stay inside the ship and that's an order!" 

There was no response from Fenris; as always, he tended to obey or ignore commands depending on whether he thought it was the 'correct' command. A series of lights on his panel indicated that one of the external airlocks was cycling; Hawke hovered over the override button, but forced his hand back down at the last minute. 

Fenris was right. He usually was. And Hawke couldn't let his own fear stand in the way of Fenris' judgment. Even now, when Fenris might be walking right out into a debris storm of hungry predators, alone… 

Fear swelled, then subsided. _"Love?"_ Anders' voice, hesitant over the comm. 

"Maker, Anders, don't drain yourself to nothing for me," Hawke said, his voice coming out unnaturally calm. "You don't need this, not after the Fade walk you've already been through. I'll be all right." 

 _"Don't be ridiculous, Garrett,"_ Anders said emphatically _. "You know that I can't just sit in my room being useless if there's something -- anything -- I can do. Just breathe, love. Try to relax, and I can help you better."_  

 _"Well,"_ Fenris' voice cut back in over the comm; he sounded dry and stoic as usual, but that was no indication. He always did. _"I can positively confirm, we are out of the debris field."_

 "That's good?" Hawke said, turning his attention immediately outwards again. 

 _"Yes. I have already begin work in clearing the creatures. But, I will need your help."_  

"Mine?" Hawke repeated, confused for a moment before the meaning sunk in. Help killing the spiders. Fenris meant that Hawke needed to go out there, put on a suit and a handgun and go one-on-one with these monsters, no viewscreen or plating but only a thin space suit, the smallest tear of which could mean instant death… 

Fear peaked, then subsided. Hawke found himself breathing steadily again. "Are you sure?" he said. 

 _"Entirely. There are too many of them for me to clear alone in the time window we have. We need a second gun on the outside, and Anders is far too exhausted to be trusted in a spacesuit. It has to be you, Garrett. And it has to be you sooner, if you wish Anders to be in any shape to assist."_  

Fenris didn't often use his given name. That he did so meant he was scared too, no matter how dry and detached a front he put on. It pierced through the layer of fear and calm right to Hawke's heart; fear _for_ momentarily overrode fear _of,_ infusing him with a new conviction. "I'll be right out," he promised, and pushed himself up from the captain's chair. 

 

* * *

 

 

As he moved through the ship -- not quite a scramble, but with all due haste -- Hawke took a moment to thank the Maker again that he had Anders in his crew. He'd always hated spiders, always been frightened of them, a phobia that life in the slums of Kirkwall had badly exacerbated. The thought of willingly walking out into a field of giant, spaceborne ones -- 

Without Anders' help, it would have been a torment. Even with him, it would be unpleasant. 

Although there were some characteristics common to all espers as a group -- the ability to navigate the Fade being one of them -- individual espers varied widely from one to another. There was a broad spectrum of possible talents, from the simple and powerful to the subtle and arcane. Some espers were more suited to a brute-force approach, able to unleash powerful psychic assaults against ranks of their enemies. Others were more attuned to communication, long- and short-range transmissions with better detail and clarity than non-espers could ever dream of.

Others still seemed to be more attuned to communicating with nonhumans; terrestrial animals, Fade denizens, or even the strange psychic wavelength of the Qunari overmind. There were as many different kinds of telepathic talent as there were telepaths to wield them; ostensibly, the purpose of the Circles was to help each esper identify their strengths and refine them (although in practice, only the skillsets that proved useful to Council operations were ever developed.) 

By talent and training Anders was a mindmed, a psychic healer. Mind medics were specialized in a wide range of beneficial psionic operations both in and out of combat -- to shield, buffer, boost, and heal. In addition to shielding troops from psychic assaults by enemies (which almost every esper could do at some level, some better than others) mindmeds used their powers to suppress pain, fatigue, anger or fear, while enhancing clarity of thought and quick reflexes. A mindmed paired with even a green recruit could help them perform at the level of a trained combat veteran, blocking out pain or shock caused by injuries and keeping the person from freezing up in terror. 

They were also invaluable in clinical settings, helping patients work past PTSD and other traumatic reactions. Experienced mindmeds could go even beyond modern psychoactive drugs in treating many mental illnesses, stopping intrusive thoughts or hallucinations, breaking out of obsessive thought patterns and alleviating extreme mood swings. It was a rare and extremely valuable skill, to be able to reach into another person's mind and obviate whatever distress or trauma they might be feeling -- but there was a fine line to walk between harm and healing.

The thought of someone else deliberately meddling in your thoughts and emotions -- even unwanted thoughts and harmful emotions -- brushed dangerously close to public paranoias about espers. Fenris was on the extreme end, refusing any and all offers of psionic palliatives, but his attitude was a common one. Mindmeds were almost as feared and distrusted as espers with more martial talents, if not more so; they were kept close in the heart of Andrastean strongholds, and never, ever allowed to work on patients without close Templar scrutiny. 

There was much that Hawke found ridiculous and even offensive about the Council of Song and their practices towards esper, but this aspect in particular outraged him. He had never in his life met a man more stringently devoted to his own code of ethics than Anders. Short of an emergency, Anders never exerted his talents on another's mind without explicit permission, never went in deeper than he was invited, never left any lingering aftereffects. He did it because he was a good man, and because he wanted to help, not because of the presence of some carbon-fiber-shell thug standing over him with a taser gun -- 

The gear-up came into view, interrupting his thoughts, and Hawke forced himself to attend to the current situation. He was headed into combat; it was time to act like it. 

His vacuum suit was already on -- a flat pack on the back panel of his skinsuit when dormant, ready to assemble itself around his body at the touch of a button or the taste of vacuum, it was never far from them when the ship was in transit. But there were also optional armor panels that could be added on for protection and toughness, and he pulled them from their slot in the gear-up station and slapped them on his torso, arms, and thighs. There was only so much protection that could be added to the helmet if he wanted to see out of it, leaving his face a vulnerable point he would have to guard for. 

Local grav soles for his boots, so that he could walk on the ship's surface; there were mag boots that did the same thing for a much less ferocious power drain, but those were clunky and gripped the foot like heavy mud. He might need the agility that would come with the grav boots, so he stepped into them and stomped to settle them against his feet. 

Last in the ensemble was his weapon; he reached for the rack of laser pistols and then hesitated, noticing an empty container cell further down. There were two plasma rifles in the arsenal, which meant that Fenris had taken the other -- not his usual choice of weapon, but he must have thought the situation warranted it. 

It wasn't his usual choice of weapon either, Hawke thought as he picked up the plasma rifle with a grimace; he wasn't as familiar with plasma weapons as he was with laser guns. Laser guns were intuitive, steady and reliable. There was no need to worry about gravitational parabolas or crosswinds with a laser pistol; where you aimed was where you hit. Sight your target, pull the trigger, drop your target. Nice and neat.

The problem was, while lasers could kill and cauterize, they provided no additional kinetic kick to shove your target back and away. The beam would go through the body and continue on into space behind it for eternity, and your kill would just drop in place. 

Plasma rifles -- sun guns, as they were commonly known -- fired wads of superheated hydrogen plasma accelerated to near-speed of sound by the same magnetic field that kept them suspended in the thick, stubby barrel. They were heavy, awkward and clumsy, slow to load and slow to fire, with a recoil that could knock you on your ass, but they would not only blow your target into flaming pieces but blow the pieces in a steady away-wards direction. 

Right now, superheated spider pieces floating in an away-wards direction from his ship was exactly the outcome that Hawke was looking for. He buckled the plasma cartridges around his waist and thighs, and on a last-minute impulse grabbed the smallest of the laser pistols as well. Couldn't hurt to be prepared. 

Armed and armored, Hawke clanked towards the nearby airlock. Three hundred seconds had passed since he'd left the bridge, and he was counting each one. 

He stepped into the airlock; the door slid shut behind him, the lights changing color as the lock began to depressurize. As normal sound faded to nothing, Hawke grew more aware of the subtler sounds of the ship he could feel through his feet, through the hull: a dull, persistent scraping and grinding noise that pressed against his bones. 

He keyed on his suit's comm.. "I'm in the airlock now," he reported to all channels. He received a grunt of acknowledgement from Fenris, but little more; the elf was obviously distracted. But Anders' tired, husky voice sounded almost directly in his ear. 

 _"I have the bridge,"_ he reported. _"And I'll be with you, as well. Maker, Hawke, I wish I could go out and help you fight in person. But I guess that's not… well."_

"Someone has to stay inside the ship when a party is on EVA," Hawke reminded him. "If Fenris and I are out, you have to be in." 

Their small crew was barely large enough to follow spacer regulations when it came to EVA; space-walkers were required to have at least one spotter at all times, but also required to have someone on board the ship in case of emergencies. Between the three of them, that meant Anders stayed inside more often than not; he was a competent enough astronaut, but extra-vehicular activity was not one of his strong suits even when he wasn't running on four straight days of sleep deprivation. 

Speaking of which… "How are you doing?" Hawke said. "Got enough energy left to stay awake for this?" 

 _"I'll make it happen,"_ Anders vowed. _"If I have to, I'll take another stim tab before the two hours are up. I was planning to be awake longer than that in the first time, anyway."_  

Silently, Hawke vowed not to let it come to that. One way or other, this would be over in less than two hours. The airlock flashed -- there was no accompanying beep -- and Hawke hit the button to slide the outer lock open, and stepped out into the eternal night. 

From here he could see the asteroids and comets of the debris field floating high over his head -- though at the same time, far below in a vast pit. He grabbed a tether from its spool beside the airlock and hooked the carbine into his belt. It was redundant -- his grav boots would keep him planted, and his suit had maneuvering jets built in -- but it made him feel better. The tether was two hundred fifty meters of braided carbon; he could walk from one end of the ship to the other on it, or around the middle entirely. 

Only once he was secured did he draw the sun gun from his belt and start forward, scanning the ship's surface. It was pitch black out here without a nearby sun to illuminate it; turning on his headlamp and shining it before him, he saw evidence of Fenris' passage right away; not ten meters from the airlock door were tell-tale scorch marks along the hull, centered on long gouges in the plating and round pits that sank to disturbing depths. 

Following the trail, Hawke sought out his elven partner. "Fenris?" he said into the mic. "I'm armed and I'm out. Where do you need me?" 

Fenris' voice was brusque and slightly breathless when he returned. _"Lateral along the starboard side,"_ he instructed. _"I've cleared the immediate area around the airlock and have been working my way forward. But the thickest infestation is along the bow. We'll close on them from two sides and finish them off together."_  

"Got it," Hawke said. He turned around and played his light over the hull in the direction Fenris had indicated, searching for a target. 

They weren't hard to see. Clusters of spheres made a quivering mass on the once-smooth and unbroken lines of the Lady Amell, each one big enough to nearly fill the airlock he just came out of. When his light first played over them he thought they were white, flashing blindingly in his eyes, but as his eyes adjusted he realized they were actually a black so glossy it reflected all light that turned on it. Swirls of color undulated across the surface -- pink, brown, and green -- that seemed to pulse to some internal heartbeat. 

As his light trained on one of them, a ripple began to form on the surface, concentric rings forming like a drop of water falling into a sink. In the center of the ripple, a gleaming black circle appeared, and sprouted an matte-black orb. Another eye appeared, and another, and swiveled to focus on him. 

More ripples appeared on the quivering circle, more rings -- but these, instead of spawning additional eyes, broke the shimmering surface with a deep draining pit; lining the sides, he got glimpses of rows and rows of silver sawlike protrustions. Teeth, he decided with a churning feeling in his gut, those were definitely teeth. 

It would have been easy to become frozen in horror, fascinated by the repulsive appearance of the things -- but thanks to Anders' steady buffer in his mind, he felt no more than a mild revulsion. When another ripple-and-bulge began to bubble on the side of the creature, and abruptly extruded a long, spindly black appendage that lashed out towards him with breakneck speed, Hawke managed to dodge the attack. He planted his grav-soles firmly on the deck, turned his plasma gun on the creature that had spotted him, and fired. 

A kick against his hand, a soundless flare of light, and a sizzling ball of fire shot across the distance and exploded against the creature's skin. It lit up like a bonfire, mouths opening in a soundless shriek as it shriveled and disintegrated. When the flare had faded, only a scorched crust of indistinguishable matter remained on the ship's surface; the rest sprayed slowly out into space, red-hot cinders slowly flickering out. 

Hawke grinned, a thrill of vicious satisfaction flowing through him. _One down._  

He made his way steadily along the skin of the ship, blasting each spider-creature that he came to. Some of them were clustered together in groups, which made a handy target -- but a single shot didn't always kill them at once, so then he had burning, flailing spider-legs to deal with. If the initial blast didn't scrape them off the hull -- and it often didn't, at least not entirely -- then he had to physically push whatever chunks remained off into space. Despite the zero-gravity that took a lot of effort; they may not have had weight, but they still had a hell of a lot of inertia. It became a rhythm: move, fire, brace, shove, move again, be ready to dodge on a hair-trigger… 

Through the comm channel, Hawke could hear Fenris grumbling. _"A billion kilometers of empty space in every direction, and you manage to drop us squarely in the middle of Cockroach Central,"_ he said. A brief wash of static -- most likely the nimbus from him firing his weapon -- and then his voice resumed. _" -- twenty kilometers -- ten! -- in any direction, and we would have been clear. Would that really have been so hard?"_  

A loud, aggravated sigh came from over the comm.. _"Look, I've told you and told you it doesn't work like that,"_ Anders said, sounding deeply annoyed _. "Fade travel only works to get us places in the first place because in the Fade, all that empty space doesn't exist. Everywhere is **somewhere**. Anywhere you come out of the Fade, you're going to be at a place, even if it's not a place you wanted to be."_  

Fenris only snorted. Hawke blasted another pair of spider-creatures, their spindly legs burning to a crisp even as they reached for him, and decided to chime in. "You know, if you look at it another way, this place could be a treasure trove in its own right." 

 _"And how did you come to that conclusion_?" Fenris asked dryly. 

"Well, have you _ever_ seen any creatures like this before?" Hawke had to climb over a pile of incinerated flesh to move forward; it burned even through the soles of his boots. He put his shoulder to the mass and shoved, the effort forcing a grunt from his lips. "A completely new species of alien life -- a xenobiologist would have a field day with this." 

 _"Well, if you want, we could try to capture a few specimens alive for the journey back…"_ Anders suggested in a teasing tone, and Hawke shuddered despite the dampening on his emotions. 

"Maker, no," he exclaimed. "But once we move far enough to get a triangulation, we can mark this place on the star-maps for later. If the xenos from the Orlesian University want to come study the giant squishy space-bugs on their own time, they're more than welcome to." 

Talking -- the jokes, the banter -- helped keep his mind off the endless void overhead, the malevolent monstrous stares of the creatures on all sides. There were dozens of them -- individual blobs further towards the middle of the ship, thickening towards the bow until they completely covered the metal plating. Any individual one of them wasn't too difficult to defeat, but there were so many -- it was an endless, grueling slog, and there was no time to waste. 

He met up with Fenris on the top side of the ship near the median; a wide swath of charred destruction attested towards the work the elf had already done. In addition to his sun gun, Fenris also carried a long slender metal blade; it looked dull and unremarkable, but Hawke knew damn well that it was a nanoblade, a carbon-fiber edge barely nanometers wide. It would cut through damn near anything, including the wielder if they weren't careful. 

They touched helmets briefly in the middle of the battlefield; through the layers of refraction of Fenris' headset Hawke could see that the elf was grey and sweating. "Hawke," he greeted him gladly. "You are well?" 

"I'm doing fine," Hawke said. "As long as I get to blast them, there's no problem. Anders is helping me keep it together." 

"I would not have asked this of you if it wasn't important," Fenris added, sounding apologetic, and Hawke felt a prick of remorse. It was his own mindless panic that had gotten them into trouble in the first place, and yet here Fenris was, apologizing for not being able to clean up Hawke's mess all by himself. Fenris who walked calmly out into the void and faced the monsters without prompting or encouragement, simply because it needed to be done. Hawke needed Anders to find the courage, but Fenris drew it all from his own heart. 

He was so damn lucky to have these two men in his life, and at times like this he didn't know if he was worthy of them. 

They worked together, not so much back-to-back as in tandem, moving forward with the other on their flanks. The comm chatter dried up as the minutes ticked onwards, neither man having the breath to spare for banter. The more progress they made, the more time they bought themselves -- but while they could afford to slow down, they couldn't afford a break. 

Fire, reload, move, shove, fire, reload, move. It was easy to fall into a rhythm, almost hypnotically so. Hawke knew that Fenris was flagging, although he wouldn't admit it -- he'd been fighting for longer, and without Anders' support, his reflexes were slower. 

Hawke felt it like a sudden pop or hiss against his armor; glancing down, his headlamp played over a shining black fiber so hair-thin he could barely see it. He followed it back up, and back, and back until it joined with a bundle more of the hair-thin filaments to make up one wriggling, hairy leg. Feelers, he realized; long enough to extend for kilometers or more into space, to sense enemies or prey -- 

He saw the blow coming and threw himself to the side. "Watch out!" he shouted, and Fenris turned a moment too slowly. The telescoping leg slammed into his chest, knocking him off his feet and ripping his feet off the ground. He skidded along the surface of the ship, feet slipping and failing to find purchase, clutching at the black appendage dug into his chest. The leg had long, fine barbs along it, each an inch long, that had dug straight into the material of his spacesuit -- and when the leg retracted, it yanked him along like a fish on a hook. 

"Fenris!" Hawke shouted, and galloped along the hull after him, trying to cover the distance before the spider could. He fired once, twice to the left as he went, trying to clear the way before they found themselves flanked, and then fumbled to reload as he ran. Even with grav soles he felt so slow, so clumsy -- 

Too slow; Fenris had reached the spider's body before he did, and had stabbed his blade into the thing's skin, struggling with the blade to brace himself against its mass. Maker, these things could chew holes in _spaceship hulls;_ what were they going to do to a human body in a flimsy spacesuit? Hawke raised his gun, finger tightening on the trigger, then ground to a halt at the very last moment. 

Fenris was too close. If he fired now, the burst of plasma would engulf him as well as the monster. He flung the gun aside and ripped out his laser pistol instead. Set his sights on the thing's center of mass, through one of its compound eyes, and fired as rapidly as the trigger mechanism would let him. 

The energy beams ripped through the spider and out the other side. It seized and trembled, all limbs stiffening and curling in on itself -- and then stilled, freezing to the side of the hull like it had been there for centuries. 

Hawke lowered the pistol, took a shaky breath. The leg that had hooked Fenris had gone dead with the rest of the monster, but was still held stiff and rigid in the air. Fenris wrenched the sword out of the thing's body -- switching to his left hand, for some reason -- and after several clumsy swipes managed to sever the limb. "Fenris?" he said. "You all right?" 

"I --" The strangled, strained voice that came over the comm. didn't sound anything like all right. "I -- I am -- " 

"Did your suit get holed?" Hawke demanded, pulling him around by one arm and flipping his light on the site of the blow. The tiny barbs had left deep gouges across the armor's surface -- and yes, there was the telltale tiny geyser of escaping gas. The spacesuit's material had self-seal and self-heal capacity, but not for so many rips at once.  _"Shit!"_  

Hawke dug frantically in his supply pouch, and came up with a roll of duct tape, which he slapped in a makeshift seal across the tears. Fenris sagged in his arms, going to nearly his knees as the pressure in his suit equalized. "Can't… catch my breath," he said, voice still choked. "Right arm -- I think -- dislocated." 

That explained the left-handed swordwork. "You need to get back inside," Hawke said. "Now." 

"And leave you… out here by yourself?" Fenris tried to smile, but it came out as more of a grimace. His lips were an unpleasant purple color in the cold light of Hawke's headlamp. He squeezed his eyes shut. "I… am sorry. I don't think… I have a choice." 

 _"Fenris,"_ Anders' voice came tentatively over the comm.. _"You know I could…"_  

"No!" Fenris shouted -- nearly screamed. "My mind is my own! My thoughts are my own! Do not!" 

 _"Maker forbid I try to help,"_ Anders grumbled, but subsided. _"I'll meet you at the airlock, and help you to the infirmary, at least."_

"Sorry…" Fenris sighed, all the fight running out of him like air. 

"You already did most of the work before I came out here," Hawke said soothingly; he got to his feet and pulled Fenris up beside him, careful not to apply torque on the injured arm. "I can finish up on my own, I'm sure. Besides, this way I get to take all the credit for finishing the job!" 

Fenris' lips puffed open on a laugh, and he closed his eyes. 

It wasn't actually hard to maneuver Fenris back to the airlock; even suited and armored, he just didn't have all that much mass. Hawke saw him to safety, the airlock door scything closed on Fenris' grey face, and turned back to the grim work ahead of him with a mind that would not let him feel grief nor fear.

 

* * *

 

~tbc... 

 


	5. The Lady Amell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bit of down time for the crew of the Lady Amell, a chance for rest and... recreation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I promised zero-G sex, and here we go. I can't vouch for its quality, but don't say I didn't try.

 

It took another hour of fighting before Hawke could be sure that the last of the spiders were dead, and then another three hours slog to remove the bulk of the dead carcasses from the hull. Even dead, the creatures secreted an enzyme that ate away at the lining of the armor, so they all had to go. At the end of it all, the hull of the Lady Amell was scarred and pitted and damaged, but at least it wasn't getting _worse._  

As he climbed into the airlock and went through the decontamination process, gravity returned and brought with it the crushing weight of exhaustion. He didn't hurt anywhere, didn't feel the burn of fatigue or bruises and scrapes from any of the battles of the past few hours; mostly he just felt… numb. There was a pressure in his head that seemed to close the world in around him as tightly as the airlock enclosed his space, and he knew from experience that when it was removed, it would hit him like a ton of cargo. 

Before he went to the sleeping cabin to collapse, however, he went first to the infirmary. 

Anders had met Fenris at the airlock when he'd staggered inside, and more-or-less carried him to their medical bay. It wasn't a very large one; there wasn't space on the Lady Amell for more than two medi-beds and bulk cabinets of supplies. Hawke had reasoned that if more than two of them were ever hurt badly enough to be bed-bound at any given time, they'd have bigger problems. 

But tonight, at least, the translucent cover of the medi-bed was pulled back, and Fenris was sitting up in the bed, the color restored to his face and eyes. Only a few sensor leads attached to his chest and wrist, no IVs. Anders sat on the foldable stool beside the bed, a reader in hand; the bags under his eyes resembled bruises by now, but he kept on going. 

He looked up when Hawke entered and a smile lit those eyes, almost eclipsing the shadows. "Hawke!" he exclaimed. "Here's the hero of the hour; here to see our would-be hero of the hour?" 

Fenris growled and aimed a left-handed punch at his arm; the angle was awkward enough that Anders dodged it easily. It was hard for Hawke to find any humor in the situation, but he knew it was expected of him, so he summoned a smile and cast around for a joke. "If heroism is measured in spider guts, I think there's enough to go around," he said, then looked at Fenris. "Are you all right?" 

"I am fine," Fenris grumbled. "You do not need to --" 

"Coddle you?" Anders interrupted him, and Fenris glared at him. Anders chuckled nastily. "Called it. Really, though, he really is fine. Moderate hypoxia, treated with a 60-part oxygen by cannula; no tissue damage. Two cracked ribs and one broken, treated with biostim and painkillers, should be completely healed by morning; wrenched shoulder that will be gone before then; last but not least, some MTBI that the medical computers should probably monitor overnight." 

"He'll be sleeping in here, then?" Hawke said, feeling only a mild twinge of disappointment against the static in his head; he'd really been looking forward to resting in the embrace of both his lovers after the day he had. Unless he slept in the infirmary… no. He wanted his own bed, and soon. 

" _Venhedis_ , stop talking over me like I am not here," Fenris snapped. He swiped for the medical reader, Anders just barely getting it out of his reach. "I do not need to stay in the infirmary, and _you_ are not a doctor, so you may stop needlessly putting on airs." 

"Fourteen months of nursing training in the Circle and six of field medicine, that makes me the most qualified doctor on this ship," Anders retorted, cradling the reader closer to his chest. "Compared to your, what? Can you even read a medical text without sounding out the long words? At least I know what all the medical equipment _does,_ instead of just pressing the pretty buttons in the right order --" 

The two of them devolved into bickering, and it took Hawke a long moment to remember that he was expected to intervene, as always. "All right, enough," he said, unable to keep the weariness out of his voice. "Fenris, stay here tonight. Captain's orders. I refuse to let you risk permanent damage when there's no need. Anders, stop baiting Fenris. I'm going to bed." 

It wasn't nearly as much placation as he usually had to put in, but it served; the two of them stopped their squabbling and both looked to him. Anders stood up and tossed the reader onto the mattress, where Fenris grabbed it up. "Right," he said, a hint of remorse in his voice. "Sorry." 

"As you say, Captain," Fenris said quietly. He must be tired, too; medical treatment was no substitute for real rest. "I will remain here." 

"And I'll head off to bed too, while we're at it," Anders said. "My last stim is just about running dry, and I'm knackered. Planning to take a bath before you turn in?" 

That sounded heavenly, but also like more effort than Hawke had in him. "No," he sighed. "In the morning." 

Anders nodded. He turned to the bank of drawers and scanned them quickly, pulling something out which he stuffed in a pocket before he turned to Hawke. "Shall we?" 

The walk down the corridor to their cabin felt like an odyssey. If Fenris hadn't been laid up, Hawke might actually have asked him to turn the gravity back off; as it was, it felt doubled. At last they reached their sleeping cabin, and Hawke sighed as they slipped into its dim warmth. He was no less tired, but some of the weight seemed to fall off his shoulders when the door slid closed behind him. Here was safety. Here was home. 

Another moment slipped away from him, and Hawke found Anders standing in front of him, hands gripping his shoulders as he looked straight into Hawke's eyes. "Ready?" he asked. 

Hawke sighed again. "Yeah," he said, dreading and anticipating the lifting of Anders' blocks from his mind in equal measure. He'd be glad to get rid of them, but this was gonna suck. 

It did suck. As the silent pressure and static lifted from his mind, Hawke felt his head throb as though it had suddenly expanded three sizes. The air seemed to roar in a rush about him, like he had been flung violently through space, and his stomach dropped precipitously as the full impact of the last six hours crashed down on him all at once. 

Anders had aimed him in the right direction, at least, and it took only a few strides before he found the toilet and was retching into it. He knew it was the sudden change of blood pressure more than anything else; but the back of his eyes swam with visions of crawling, chittering monsters, vast aching pinwheeling gulfs of emptiness overhead and underneath, skin and guts crisping black and curling in the lick of flames, Fenris' hoarse scream as the monster yanked him away -- 

The worst of nausea ebbed, and the world seemed to settle down around him after the first rush passed. Hawke leaned his forehead against the cool tile of the bathroom and just concentrated on breathing. It would pass, it always passed, and by tomorrow it would be better.

"Here," Anders said from behind him, and Hawke looked up and opened his eyes to see Anders filling a flask with water. He dropped something round and blue into the water, which foamed and sizzled before turning it an appealing aqua color, and handed it over. "Drink up." 

Hawke took the glass gratefully and gulped it down, washing the bile from his throat. It was a little too sickly sweet, but that was all right; he could taste the electrolytes that he needed to stabilize his system. And something else, a slightly bitter medicinal tang. "Arbor blessing?" he asked, referring to the name of a common over-the-counter anxiolytic. 

"Just a bit, to help you relax and settle," Anders replied. "It's not strong." 

Hawke nodded. He trusted Anders knew what he was doing. It wouldn't take much to help him sleep -- Maker, as soon as he got off his feet he'd drop like a rock -- but he could already feel himself calming. 

Anders wet a washcloth in warm water, then handed it over. Hawke groaned at the thought of more chores before bed. "I know you said you'd shower in the morning, but you'll sleep better if you don't feel so grimy," he said. The corner of his mouth curled upwards. "And I know I'll sleep better if you don't smell so rank." 

Hawke growled. "Let's see you go six hours in a spacesuit and come out smelling like a rose," he said, but Anders only laughed and left him to his ablutions. 

When Hawke came out of the bathroom, feeling wrung out as a dishrag but lighter, Anders had already bedded down and turned down the lights. Hawke crawled in beside him, nestling up beside his lover and throwing his leg over Anders', and let out a long exhale that carried the rest of the day with it. 

It wasn't perfect. He ached all over, his whole body seeming to throb in time with his heartbeat; memories of the attack and the battle on the hull of the ship seemed to slosh around endlessly behind his eyelids. The other side of the mattress was a glaring emptiness, a reminder that Fenris had been hurt, that they hadn't gotten away unscathed. 

But they were alive, and safe, and that was the important part; the rest could follow. 

Hawke slept.

 

* * *

 

 

There was no morning in space, but the ship systems were programmed to change the lighting -- subtly, according to user preferences -- to wax and wane in time with human biorhythms. Hawke woke up when the lighting bars around the corners of the room changed color, and rolled over to squint at the ship's clock. He'd slept about eleven hours. 

Anders, tangled in the sheets beside him, was still dead to the world -- he barely responded even to Hawke's shuffling. That wasn't a surprise; he'd been known to sleep for half a day or more when he came down off a Fade jump. Hawke extracted himself carefully from Anders' grasp and stood -- for a moment just standing there in the middle of the room, mind blank, trying to get himself back on task. 

Toilet first. Then bath? His stomach was still numb with sleep, but he had a feeling it would wake up angry if he left it for too long. All right. Toilet, then food, then bath. Then… other things. Awake Garrett could deal with that once he arrived. 

He stumbled into the galley to find Fenris already there, his own breakfast in front of him. Relief washed through him to see Fenris on his feet and whole, but his stomach was definitely making itself known, so he only gave him a smile and a wave (which Fenris reciprocated with a grunt) as he made a beeline for the food cupboards. 

Cooking anything -- even the five-minute 'instant' foods that made up the bulk of their stores -- was unbearable to think of right now, so Hawke went for the pre-prepared rations instead. Looking over his choices, Hawke pulled out a foil-wrapped bar of something that advertised it as " _pan au chocolat --_ a light and fluffy traditional pastry accented with creamy, hazelnut spread! _"_  

He took a bite, then let out a sigh. As with all space rations, it was destined to be disappointing -- the bread was pressed flat, almost gummy in consistency, and the filling was just sugar paste with fake chocolate flavoring. Still, it was what he needed right now, and he held it in his mouth as he poured himself a cup of steaming black coffee and seasoned it with evaporated milk. Breakfast of champions in hand, he made his way over to sit next to Fenris. 

Fenris gave the breakfast pastry a sneer of disdain that it probably deserved, and wordlessly extended his fork with a slice of sausage speared on the end. Hawke accepted it with a grateful smile; even if the sausage was just as processed and artificial as his own breakfast, at least it was hot. The rest of Fenris' breakfast was some dark green mush -- Hawke suspected kale, which for some unfathomable reason Fenris adored -- and he made no move to share it, which was fine with Hawke. 

A few minutes passed in peaceful silence as both men munched their way through their meal. After a few bites, Hawke felt awake enough to swallow his mouthful and remark, "You're all healed up for sure, then? Everything's all right?" 

Fenris gave him a nod. "For the most part, I was entirely healed last night," he said. "I did not truly require the extra hours in the infirmary. But you seemed near distraught, so I allowed it." 

Hawke accepted that with a nod. "Sorry," he offered. 

A shrug. "I could hardly hold an excess of concern against you," he said. "Especially as you were not in your right mind at the time." 

Hawke felt his eyebrows rise with bemusement. "I'm pretty sure that with Anders buffing my mind, my judgment would actually be _better,_ not _worse,"_ he said. 

Fenris pursed his lips, and did not answer, though Hawke did not mistake that for agreement. Well, if Fenris was willing to let it pass, then so was he. 

He took another slurp of coffee, then noticed that Fenris hadn't touched his own mug at all. Actually, now that he looked closer, it was just an empty mug with a teabag in it and a carafe of hot water, and set a little to the side. For himself, Fenris was drinking plain water. Hawke nodded towards the mug. "That for Anders?" 

"Whenever he stirs," Fenris said with a nod. "An herbal tea blend with some sorbitol. It is highly efficiently in combating 'fade hangover,' the headache and fatigue that pilots often experience after an extended trip." He hesitated for a moment, then said in a deliberately noncommittal tone, "I used to prepare it for Danarius." 

Hawke's mouth dropped open, and he started to say something, then closed it again. After a minute he offered, "Are you sure? I mean, are you really okay with that? You don't have to do anything that you used to, you know, with _him --"_  

Fenris shook his head, cutting off Hawke's awkward attempts at reassurance. "No need to read so much into it," he said. "It is just tea."

It wasn't, though. It was a thoughtful and considerate gesture, one that he was making entirely out of his own volition; neither Anders nor Hawke would have asked him to do it. Fenris made many such gestures, Hawke had noticed, preferring to show his caring through actions instead of words. He did them for Hawke -- a hundred little things over the course of a day -- and he did them for Anders. 

"You know," Hawke said, and cleared his throat. "You don't have to pretend. You really do love Anders, don't you?"

The look Fenris gave him was flatly incredulous. "Don't be absurd," he said. "Of course I do." 

"But you still fight with him all the time," Hawke pushed onwards, feeling foolish and awkward and like he was stepping into wild territory. They were both his lovers, why _shouldn't_ he talk to them about their relationship? "I know he can be obnoxious sometimes," underselling it a bit, but he felt like he shouldn't speak ill of Anders behind his back. "But you can't deny that you're the one who usually starts things. If you love him, and he loves you -- and I know he does, I know he cares just as much -- then why can't you two just be civil human beings to each other?" 

Fenris kept his face impassive. If not for the fact that he avoided Hawke's gaze, studying his mug as though it had suddenly become fascinating, there would have been no indication as to how unsettled he really was. "Because he is an esper," he said at last. 

He supposed part of him had expected the answer, but it still saddened him. "And your hate of espers is really that strong? That you can't let go of it even with a man you love? I know what you've been through, that you were terribly abused by espers, Fenris -- but Anders is not like them." 

"Hate is not what it's about," Fenris said. His voice was almost a whisper, as he stared into the reflective surface of his cup. "You say you know what I've been through but Hawke, you don't. You can't, not really. Being… To be a slave to a magister, in Tevinter… it is to be nothing. No person, no self. You are only an extension of your master's needs, his thoughts, his wishes. Defiance was unthinkable -- literally impossible to think of. To disagree, to refuse to obey, to mock or needle or insult -- would not have been possible. And even if it had been, if Ma-gister's attention had wandered enough to allow it, then discipline would have been… swift, and… severe." 

Silence filled the galley. After a moment Fenris cleared his throat and picked up his drink, taking a sip. His voice when he spoke again was more normal, less disjointed and strained. "And so I disagree, and I mock, and I needle and insult, because I _can,_ because every defiant thought reminds me that I am here and I am free. And every instance that passes with no punishment for all of my insolence reminds me that Anders is not that man. He could stop me if he truly wished to -- he is capable of it, you and I both know it -- but he does not. And that means more to me than you can ever know." 

Hawke didn't know what to say. His breath struggled in his chest, his eyes filled with tears. Fenris was right; Hawke couldn't really _know_ what he'd been through, the pain and degradation he'd suffered; but just trying to imagine it filled him with shame and sorrow. "I'm sorry," he said, and his voice came out as a croak. 

Fenris glanced up at him quickly and gave him a small smile. "No need for you to be sorry," he said. "It was hardly your doing. In fact, your protection ensures that I will never have to return there."

Hawke shook his head wordlessly. "But I'm still -- Maker, Fenris," he said, and wiped his eyes roughly. "No one should have to go through that. Especially not you." 

"Oh," Fenris said with a sigh. 

Fenris reached over the table towards him. Hawke thought he might take his hand, but instead he reached up and stroked thin fingers across his face, gently tracing along his cheek. The look in his eyes was tender, but also somehow amused. "You're a kind man, Garrett Hawke -- it's part of what draws us both to you so strongly," he said. "You always prefer to talk your way out of things if you can, use trickery if you can't. You dislike conflict and want everyone to get along. 

"But not everyone is like that. Some people like it, the conflict, the challenge. Some people enjoy a bit of a fight." Fenris patted his check affectionately, then dropped his hand. "We don't bring it to you because we know you don't. But I have my reasons for being the way I am, and Anders has his."

  

* * *

  

With food and coffee in his stomach, Hawke was finally awake -- present enough in his own skin to feel the layer of grime cemented to it. The quick sponge bath last night had helped, but it was time for a real bath. 

Fortunately -- and unusually -- the Lady Amell actually came equipped with a bath (a small in-joke that never failed to make him laugh, even if neither of his crewmates were amused.) Hawke had paid premium to get a model with this particular luxury feature included: a larger-than-usual water holding tank and a sealable shower/bathtub chamber. It came equipped with powerful jets and even more powerful vacuums, which sucked the water away to be cleaned and purified and re-introduced into the ship's systems. Living for long periods of time on a spaceship meant accepting that you would, on some level, always be drinking and bathing in your own piss; Hawke had gotten over it long ago. The same was true on planets, after all, just on a bigger scale. 

Since the water was completely re-cycled anyway, it didn't really matter how long he took, so he took his time: nearly an hour of soaking and luxuriating in the hot water, letting it soothe his aching muscles as it sloughed the grime off his skin. Fenris' muscles must be aching just as much, Hawke thought; he would have invited his lover in to share the bath with him, except 1) there really wasn't enough room for a second person and 2) Fenris reacted to baths with the same mix of outrage and mistrust that the original Lady ever had. 

("What if the gravity goes out when you're stuck in a room with all that water?" Fenris had complained. "You'd drown!" 

"That's what the vacuums are for, in case that happens," Hawke had attempted to persuade him, to no avail.) 

At last he gave up his sybaritic indulgence and let the water drain; he let himself back out into the bathroom and took his time with his grooming routine. By the time he left the bathroom, scrubbed and trimmed and tidied, he felt much more like himself. 

Anders was up; he heard the raised voices from the galley from well down the corridor. Suppressing a sigh, he eased into the room to find Anders at the table chowing down on sausage and toast, and Fenris over by the entertainment system, his back pointedly turned towards the esper as he flicked through the list of available shows. 

Hawke cleared his throat, and the bickering stopped as both men turned their attention to him. "So," he said. "Plans for the day?" 

"Sleep in," Anders said. "Lounge around. Be lazy." 

Fenris shot an irritated glare towards him. "Work," he said. "We do have work to do. The immediate threat may be gone, but the hull has been badly damaged." 

"Is there anything we really _can_ do about that?" Hawke asked with concern. "I mean, I'm not saying that it's not a problem, but I'd think we'd need a spaceport dock to do anything about the outer hull." 

"In the long run, yes," Fenris replied. "But we do carry some emergency repair supplies for hull repair that can least ameliorate the damage. What if the hull had actually _been_ holed? We could hardly expect to make it back to a repair facility in that condition." 

"I'm just saying we don't need to do it right away," Anders said, picking up the thread of the argument again. "It'll be a few days before we can go back into the Fade anyway. Might as well rest first, _then_ work, so we can be at our best."

 "You are just looking for any opportunity to slack off," Fenris accused him, and Anders shrugged.

"I'm a lazy guy. I never denied it," he said. "All I ever asked for out of life was a good meal, a chance to see the galaxy, and a pretty girl on my arm while I saw it. Or a pretty man. Or a pretty elf," he said, waggling his eyebrows at Fenris outrageously. "I'm flexible." 

Fenris snorted. "Anders, stop it," he said flatly. "I am not going to put off important ship repairs just to have sex with you." 

Anders pouted. Hawke couldn't keep from laughing at his expression. "Hey, what about me?" he said, trying to appease his pout. 

"Well, you heard him," Anders said sarcastically. "This is a professional operation and we all must work until we drop! No fun allowed, ever!" 

"Yes, that's exactly what I said." Fenris rolled his eyes. 

"Sure, it's easy for you two to say that, when you going at it like rabbits in the engine room less than a week ago," Hawke said, a bit of a whine in his voice. "Me, I can't even _remember_ the last time I had proper sex. Every time I try, the gravity goes out or we get attacked by Templars or space spiders appear out of nowhere. I spent all of yesterday scraping burned monster guts off the hull, for Maker's sake! Don't I deserve a little consideration?" 

By the end of his rant, Anders and Fenris were both staring at him with expressions of deep speculation. Hawke felt more than a little foolish. 

"You know, he has a point," Fenris said thoughtfully.

 "I do?" Hawke said. "I mean, of course I do." 

"He _did_ work awfully hard yesterday," Anders said with a nod. "I think that deserves some kind of reward." 

The two of them exchanged a long, meaningful glance, as though communicating telepathically. "What?" Hawke demanded, beginning to be a little worried at the hints of conspiracy. 

"I suppose the hull repairs aren't _immediately_ urgent," Fenris mused. "And now that you mention it, we do have some - unfinished business." 

Anders snorted, but refrained -- apparently with some effort -- from any followup comment. Fenris crossed the length of the galley swiftly and closed into Hawke's personal space, leaning up to give him a kiss that heated Hawke out to the tips of his ears and his toes. 

When he finally stepped back, Fenris' eyes were dark and half-lidded. "Meet us in the engine room in fifteen minutes," he purred, and then turned and left. Hawke stared after him, raising a hand to his tingling lips.

Anders laughed. "Oh, this should be _good,"_  he said. He pushed his plate away, and followed.

 

 

* * *

 

 

A quarter of an hour later found Hawke standing in the corridor by the open engineering bay hatch. He had changed into a loose pair of shorts and a tank top over his still-damp skin; he was fairly sure he wouldn't be wearing them for long. 

Fairly sure, but not completely sure. He was still a little baffled as to what all this choreography was about. Sex, while one of his favorite activities, didn't usually require much in the way of advance setup. And why the engineering bay, for the Maker's sake, of all the places on the ship? He didn't think there was even a pallet in there for Fenris to nap on for long hours of work; there didn't really need to be, since there was no gravity… 

 _Hm._  

A flush began to creep up his neck as his body heated at the thought, and he absently tugged the neckline of his tanktop away from his warming skin. Was _that_ what Fenris and Anders had in mind? Not that he objected -- there were very few combinations of Anders, Fenris and sex that he objected to -- but it had been a long time since he'd experimented with sex in zero-gravity. Both sex and null-g had their own set of physical challenges, which tended to clash with one another. But the thought… 

The thought was interrupted by a chuckle from behind him, and he started and looked over his shoulder to see Anders standing there, hands on his hips. He was dressed in a pair of loose pyjama pants, with no shirt. "Maker, Garrett, you're like a cat," he said, shaking his head with a smile playing about his lips. "Standing in an open doorway, can't make up your mind whether to go in or out." 

"You like cats," Hawke pointed out, and smiled in response. He stepped forward and swept Anders into his arms; one of Anders' hands was holding a bunched-up bundle of indeterminate black fabrics, but the other went easily around Hawke's waist. 

"I like _you,"_ Anders said, and leaned forward for a kiss. 

Hawke accepted the kiss eagerly and let it deepen, enjoying the heated slide of Anders' lips over his own. His tongue dipped past Anders' lips, mirrored by his hand sliding under the waistband of Anders' shorts; he might have gone further if a cranky voice hadn't drifted out of the hatch. "Anders, are you back yet?" Fenris called out from inside. "If so, then get Hawke in here and close the door." 

Anders chuckled again, and a moment later Hawke yelped as he found himself hip-checked through the open hatchway. He flailed a bit, tumbling through empty air, then hit the zero-g field and kept tumbling even as he felt the weight of the world wash away from him. 

Fortunately Fenris was there to intercept him, catching him in mid-air and stopping the spin. The elf was at ease, graceful in his natural element at last; Hawke found himself mesmerized by the way his white hair drifted around his head and the brilliant emerald sparkle in his eyes. Fenris' lips pursed, hiding a smile. "It's been a while since such a handsome man dropped into my lap," he said. 

Hawke cleared his throat, trying not to blush; the lingering heat of his skin didn't make that easy. "Well now that you have me," he said, "what are you going to do with me?" 

"I wonder." Fenris gave a thoughtful hum, his hands sliding down Hawke's back to grip his ass through the loose shorts. His eyes fluttered shut -- such ridiculous eyelashes for a man; Hawke loved them -- and he pulled Hawke close, their bodies flush and rubbing together as he plundered Hawke's mouth in turn. 

"Well, we're all here," Anders' cheery voice sounded from behind them; the taller man pushed his way across the engineering bay and braked to a stop nearby. Though not as graceful as Fenris, he was competent enough in freefall; he made sure to keep one hand and one foot hooked on the contact points on the wall, giving him the balance and leverage to move or stay still as needed. 

Fenris' lips moved against Hawke's in a mischievous smile, then in a sudden flurry of motion his arms came up and he launched Hawke out of his lap, sending him spinning with a squawk through the air into Anders' arms. Anders caught him deftly, using the spin to pull Hawke into his arms for another searing, breath-stealing kiss. Then Hawke found his direction suddenly reversed, and he was flying through the air again into Fenris' arms for another kiss. 

"Hey!" he objected, the word somewhat garbled by Fenris' mouth. "Enough! I'm not -- hm -- I'm not a sandbag you can just toss around." 

"Indeed you are not. My apologies for manhandling you," Fenris said, though he didn't sound sorry. In one deft, fluid movement he had his hands under Hawke's shirt and had peeled it off; Hawke grabbed for it, more out of principle than any real desire for it, but Fenris tossed it out of reach. 

"I think he likes a little manhandling," Anders observed, as he caught the shirt and folded it up tight. 

Fenris snorted. "I think you are right, for once." 

"Hey," Hawke said again, though without any real heat. Anders was right; a little manhandling in the right mood went a long way. Fenris' lips curled, and without warning he launched Hawke again. 

But that didn't mean he was going to just passively go along with it; this time when Anders caught him he managed to throw his weight, spinning Anders around in his embrace to slam up against the wall. They came to a halt with his face inches from Anders, the usual height difference obviated by the fact that Hawke's feet were hovering inches above Anders'. 

He was close enough that he felt Anders' breath wash against his lips, a little faster and deeper than even the light wrestling could account for. His amber eyes were blown wide, the pupils large and dark and dancing in the bay lights. 

"How about you?" Hawke said, finding his own voice a little strangled and short. "I think you like it, too." 

"I like _you,_ " Anders repeated; his voice was a purr, velvet soft and throaty. "I like you any way I get to have you." 

The voice sent a thrill down through his core right to his cock, and Hawke couldn't help a moan as Anders pulled him in. Anders was anchored, but he was not; only the other man's fierce grip on him, shoulder and hip, kept him from drifting away. He thrust his groin against Anders' -- brief shocks of pressure and heat where his cock met Anders' through the cloth -- but didn't really have the leverage to grind properly. 

Something small sailed past Hawke's head and bounced off Anders' forehead; the taller man had to let go of him for a moment as he grabbed for it. "Condom," Fenris' voice ordered from somewhere behind him. "I will not have everyone's semen floating around the engineering bay for the next thirty-six hours." 

Anders rolled his eyes as he plucked the little latex square out of the air. "Such a prude," he scoffed. 

"This is the air that _I breathe,_ filthy deviant," Fenris shot back. A familiar body pressed up from behind Hawke, pressure and heat, and he groaned into Anders' mouth as Fenris began to tenderly nibble on his neck. He tilted his head to the side, arching his back helplessly against the hot line of Fenris' front. "Oh, Maker," he muttered helplessly. "I'm not sure I can survive two of you at once." 

"You have so far," Fenris said with a chuckle. "I see no reason that should change now." He bit down on Hawke's shoulder, at the arch of muscle between collarbone and neck, and Hawke let go of Anders with one hand in order to grab wildly for Fenris' hair, soft as water between his fingers as he tried to hold Fenris' head in place. 

Anders pulled back from the kiss, his eyes opening on heavy-lidded lust. He reached up and brushed hair out of Hawke's eyes, traced down along his cheek and carded through his beard before caressing under his jaw, tilting his face upwards. "You are so beautiful," he murmured, and despite everything Hawke flushed. "I want to fuck you. Sound good to you?" 

"Of course," Hawke responded without hesitation; his breath seized and his hips twitched at the thought. Doubt flickered in a moment later, glancing around the engine bay. "Here? Is that… going to work?" 

"Never fear. We came prepared," Fenris said in his ear, his deep voice buzzing in Hawke's bones. There was a smug expression on his face as he tossed something over to Anders, who caught it out of the air and began to unravel it. 

As it unrolled and Hawke saw the shape of it, he began to laugh. "Safety harnesses?" 

"Don't laugh," Anders mock-scolded him, even as his own lips were twitching. "Ship safety is serious business. Anyway this is for me, not for you." 

" _This_ is for you," Fenris murmured in his ear, and Hawke shivered as a thrill washed out across his skin. Fenris pressed him forward, caught in the cage between his body and Anders. Two dexterous fingers trailed down his spine, catching in the waistband of his pants and tugging inquisitively; Hawke shimmied his hips obligingly, sliding the piece of clothing down his legs and kicking it free to float in space. 

Those cool, clever fingers slid between his buttocks, resting against his entrance, and Hawke gasped. "May I?" Fenris murmured in his ear. 

" _Fuck_ yes," Hawke groaned, and bit his lip with a whine as Fenris' fingers breached him. They were slick with lube -- Fenris clearly _had_ come prepared -- but there was still just a hint of a burn to it. Hawke spread his legs, feeling kind of foolish doing so when he had nowhere to put them but empty air, and bent his spine forward to rest his forehead against Anders' chest. 

Fenris' other hand circled around to stroke his cock, not that it really needed the encouragement; his hands cradled Hawke's pelvis between them and Hawke felt anchored, safely secured, even with the rest of him hanging out into nowhere. He took deep breaths, feeling each one flowing through him like fire, and pushed back against Fenris' fingers. 

Two fingers turned into three, then even three turned into not enough. "All right, all right, I'm ready," he said, just a hint of a whine in his voice. "Come on, I was promised fucking." 

Fenris chuckled and withdrew his fingers, slapping Hawke on the hip as he pushed back and floated free. It hadn't been a hard blow, but Hawke still felt it outlined like fire on his skin. 

"Good timing. So am I," Anders said, looking mildly proud of himself. The safety harness had been anchored on the wall in two places, and when Anders reached up and slid his arms through the straps up to the shoulders, he was able to brace his upper body solidly against the wall. He grinned at Hawke, then made a twirling motion with his free hand. "Other side of you, so I can see if Fenris did a good enough job." 

"Of course I did. I, unlike some people, never half-ass my work," Fenris grumbled as Hawke carefully maneuvered in the small space. One of Anders' arms circled his waist, his legs twined with Hawke's own, and his skin slid smoothly against his lovers as his hard cock probed against Hawke's loosened hole. The feel was just a little muted by the lubricant-slick feel of latex rubbing up against his ass; cool, but quickly warming between their heat. Hawke smothered a semi-hysterical giggle; safety first, indeed. 

"Can the two of you give it a rest?" Hawke said, the last word ending on a squeak as Anders found his angle and pushed home. Ah, it burned, but in all the best ways; heat and friction flirting with, but never turning over into, pain. 

"Then how would you know it was us?" Anders asked rhetorically, his hand caressing Hawke's hip soothingly as he waited for the other man to adjust. 

"Well, I don't -- I don't --" Hawke gasped as Anders slid further in. "I sure hope it _is_ you, since I don't make a habit of -- uhn -- of letting other men fuck me in the ass." 

"I would hope not," Fenris said mock-severely. 

"These hypothetical other men," Anders said with a bit of a wheeze in his voice, "don't know what they're missing. Handsomest ass from here to Alpha Centauri." His hand flexed on Hawke's hip, for a moment pulling him crushingly tight before he relaxed into a loose embrace. He placed a kiss on the back of Hawke's neck, inches away from the place where Fenris' toothmarks still throbbed. "Ready?" 

"Ready," Hawke agreed, and Anders began to thrust. 

Hawke _had_ experimented with zero-g sex before, but not for years and never like this. He had forgotten how much it changed things to be so unmoored, so unsteady, with Anders the only point of steady grounding in the universe. With Anders' grip the only thing keeping him from falling forever. It was terrifying; it was exhilarating. 

Fenris floated up before him, hands gripping his shoulders and pulling him into a kiss. Each time one of Anders' thrusts rocked him, the motion transmitted through his frame into Fenris' hands; but he kept his arms loose and relaxed, absorbing each impact without giving way to it. As ever, even now, Hawke envied Fenris' effortless mastery of free-fall movement. 

Another thrust rocked him forward, and Hawke arched his back up and groaned. "Feeling left out?" he said, grinning shamelessly up into Fenris' face. 

"A little," Fenris admitted, his brilliant eyes roving over the tableau the two of them presented. "Is there room for me here, I wonder?" 

If a look could devour, then Fenris' body was a feast, one Hawke gladly fed his eyes with. He'd lost his own clothes somewhere along the way, and every inch of him gleamed in the engine bay lights; the implants glowed, tracing lines along his arms up across his shoulders and chest, branching and curling along each curve. Sweat gleamed along the skin that the implants didn't cross, pooling in the creases of his collarbones and stomach and hips, framing the proud length of his jutting cock. In normal gravity it would be dripping off him; here it merely pooled. He found his own mouth watering at the thought, and licked his lips. "I think there's room," he said hoarsely. 

Fenris flashed him a sharp white grin, then straightened his arms so that he moved effortlessly up along Hawke's body. Hawke reached out to snag him by the hips, slim and strong under his grip, and lowered his head to taste. Hot and salty, steel-hard under silk-smooth, he let his tongue flick out against the underside as he took the head of Fenris' cock into his mouth. 

A particularly deep thrust from Anders sent him jolting forward, and he almost lost control of his teeth; Fenris gasped, then swore in Tevene. "Anders, do you mind!" he snapped. 

"Sorry!" Anders said, although he didn't sound particularly contrite. "I'm -- a little busy back here --" 

"Wait a moment. I have a better idea," Fenris said. He pulled back from Hawke's face, then in a sudden swift moment reversed his direction. Now he was upside-down relative to Hawke and Anders -- or were they reversed in relation to him? -- he pulled himself under Hawke's body until he had reached Hawke's cock, hard and leaking and sorely neglected with Anders' need to keep a handhold at all times. 

"What do you mean, _wait?"_ Anders demanded, aggravated. "Seriously Fenris, fuck you." 

"No, fuck _him,"_ Fenris said from somewhere under Hawke, his voice slightly muffled. "Just wait until _after_ I am situated." 

"I like this idea," Hawke said with a laugh; it quickly transmuted to a gasp and moan as his cock was enveloped by a wet, tight heat. Instinctively he tried to thrust into Fenris' welcoming mouth, only to find his movements pinned and constrained by Anders' hold on him. He had to settle for wrapping his legs around Fenris' shoulder in an attempt to pin him closer, a change in position that made him shudder with how it made Anders' cock shift inside of him. 

This left Fenris' cock bobbing enticingly in the air before him, and Hawke obliged, curling up slightly to close the circuit and suck Fenris' cock back into his waiting mouth. The scent and _taste_ of Fenris flooded his senses, cutting off further speech or even the desire for it. Anders readjusted his grip, compensating for the new position, and then he began again, each thrust sending flashes of exquisite white light through his core. 

The rest of the universe seemed to fade away, all his awareness captivated by his lovers surrounding him and filling him. Held tight in Anders' arms, his own arms filled with Fenris -- there was no bed, no mattress, no pillows, no sheets or blankets or carpet to give him rugburn on his hands or dig painfully into his knees. There was _nothing_ but the three of them, and the knowledge that outside their little bubble of steel and space there were no other living humans for a million miles -- just them, and just this. 

Anders jerked suddenly, his muscles bunching into a surge that sent Hawke rocking forward, further onto Fenris' cock and into his mouth. "Fucker!" Anders shouted, then broke down laughing. "You know damn well I'm ticklish!" 

Fenris couldn't respond, of course, but he made a smug kind of humming sound that made Hawke see stars. For a moment he felt as though they were making transition to the Fade again, breaking him apart into a hundred pieces -- and then he was floating, he was falling, he was _flying --_  

Hawke shouted, the sound muffled and indistinct as he came, hips jerking fruitlessly against Anders' steady grip as he spent himself in Fenris' mouth. The elf swallowed it all, the rippling motions of his throat wringing every last drop out of him before he found himself spent, shuddering. 

Fenris pulled back a few inches, a wet gasp brushing past Hawke's member as he released it. He curled his body further around Hawke's, his knees brushing the top of Hawke's head as he gripped his sides, and with a shudder and a full-throated shout he came in Hawke's mouth as well. 

There was a long moment when Hawke literally saw and heard nothing, floating on a haze of bliss. Anders' arms around his waist held him loosely, moving gently to the rhythm of his heavy breathing. 

"Did you --" Hawke stirred himself to mumble. He hadn't felt Anders come in his ass, unless -- oh. The condom, of course. Finishing the sentence seemed like too much effort, so he gave a tired wave of his hand to dismiss the whole thing. 

He was going to have to move eventually, to dispose of the condom and retrieve their clothes and clean up. He was itchy, covered in sweat, his throat and his ass both burning with a pleasant ache and a taste in his mouth that he wouldn't mind washing out. But for just this moment, he closed his eyes, and let himself fly.

 

* * *

 

~tbc... 


	6. Serpent Nebula

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our heroes finally catch up to the ship they've been chasing. But if they're chasing, then who's running?

Routine reasserted itself quickly over the next few days. The altercation at the spider's nest, while harrowing, was not really all that unusual in their line of work; they'd encountered many such hazards while foraging among wrecked spaceships and abandoned planetary outposts. Both hard work and danger were part of the job, and they'd learned to be resilient. 

As promised, Fenris brought out the temporary hull repair supplies: it turned out to be a bucket of silicon-based nanogel. The nanogel 'patch' would fill in the scrapes and pits, expand into a smooth, pre-sculptured shape to fill out the ship's outlines, and then harden into a rigid shell. It was no substitute for real armor, but it would protect the ship's innards from the hazards of space and the damaged plating from any further corrosion -- and there was still a good meter and a half of armor left, even in the most damaged areas. It would hold for the rest of their mission. 

While Fenris was outside working, Hawke played spotter from the bridge. Some of the time, Anders joined him, and the two of them spent hours into the night cycle talking and reminiscing.

It was strange -- the stars were always out there, night and day, crystalline and unblinking against the deep blackness of the void. Yet somehow, in the dimmer lights of the sleep cycle, hands curled around a mug of hot fake-chocolate-flavored water, they felt closer. Somehow, the night and the stars came through the viewscreens into the room with them, to wrap layers of shadows and pinprick lights around them. 

Hawke tilted his mug, swirling the last of his drink around in the bottom -- it wasn't half so good once it had gone cool. Anders was gazing at the vid monitors, which were currently trained on Fenris as he worked along the outside of the _Lady Amell's_ hull. His expression was a familiar one -- soft and fond, with just a touch of briar to it -- frustration perhaps, or envy. 

He felt moved to offer, "He really does care, you know." 

"Mm?" Anders looked up at him, his eyebrows going up as his focus shifted back to Hawke. 

"Fenris. He really does care about you." Hawke shifted uncomfortably in the pilot's chair, wondering if he should try to entice Anders into a closer embrace. The chair wasn't really big enough for two grown men, unfortunately, unless one of them was also an elf. "He told me so the other day. I know it can be hard to see it sometimes --" 

Anders laughed, cutting off the rest of Hawke's reassurances. "Garrett. I know." 

"You do?" Hawke sounded a little dubious. 

"Of course I do." Anders smiled, just a hint of wryness making it lopsided. "Even if he has some bizarre ways of showing it sometimes. Fenris is Fenris, and he has his reasons." 

Hawke frowned, looking back at the vid monitors. Fenris had said much the same thing, and Hawke supposed it wasn't really his place to meddle -- they had their own relationship, separate from his, and as often as he was called on to play moderator, it wasn't really his place to pry. Still -- "I wouldn't be able to stand it," he admitted. "All those insults, all those arguments. And you bait him into it, half the time. I can hardly stand it even as it is, and I'm not even the target." 

"Mm." Anders looked away, his wry smile fading. The dimmer, sepia-toned lights of the evening cycle blended with his strawberry-blond hair and whiskey eyes, leaving him a colorless copy of himself. "Do you remember the day we met?" he said, at last. 

Hawke did. "Vividly," he said. 

"Do you remember what that Templar said to you about me?" Anders asked. "You know. Ser Rylock?" 

Hawke hadn't remembered her name, but he remembered her; the smoking barrel of the blaster in her hand, the fanatical light under her visor, the barely-suppressed fury in her voice. At the time it had been one of the most harrowing, hectic days of his life, although his experiences since then helped put it in slightly more perspective. One Templar, no matter how murderous, was hardly the worst thing they'd faced together. 

But he remembered her parting words to him, spat at his back through a snarl. "Yeah, she said to watch my back around you 'cause you were too nice," Hawke said, rolling his eyes. It was easier to make light of it, to make light of her. 

Anders chuckled slightly, just a 'heh' of breath that quickly faded. "What she said, _exactly_ , was that you should watch out for me, because I was dangerous. Because I had a way of making people like me, making people want to help me." 

"Right," Hawke drawled. "It's called being a kind, charming and attractive person. Not something she knew anything about, I could tell." 

Normally it wasn't this hard to get Anders going -- making up creative insults for Templars was one of his favorite pastimes -- but this time, he didn't take the bait. He was staring at the monitors again, but Hawke didn't think he was really seeing them.

"Do you know what it does, Hawke, to take a child less than ten years old and tell them they're a monster?" he said at last. "That the Maker does not love them, and therefore no human being ever will either; that they're fundamentally impossible to love, and only a wicked _trick_ on the monster's part makes people wrongly think that they love them? That just by wanting to be loved -- by their parents, their friends, by anyone in the universe -- they're hurting people?" 

Hawke swallowed against a throat gone tight, but he couldn't swallow the anger. "That's bullshit." 

Anders laughed again, short and humorless. "I know it is. I can say it out loud, 'That's grade-A imported, unmitigated bullshit. This is bullshit they cook up to keep us demoralized and isolated.' And I know it, in my head. But you can know something in your head and never really accept in your heart." 

"Anders..." Hawke abandoned his cooling drink and reached out to take his lover's hand, folding his fingers around Anders' palm and squeezing tight. "This isn't some trick, what we have. I love you, because you're funny and kind and -- and wicked hot. Why wouldn't I love you? You aren't hurting me." 

Anders looked over at Hawke and smiled, and it was a real smile, but his eyes were swimming in tears. "You're so kind, Garrett Hawke," he said softly. "So giving, so bold, so unafraid. You were the lover I always dreamed of, when I daydreamed of being free. And that's exactly why I can never trust it. Do you _really_ love me, or am I just making you think you love me? Am I forcing my thoughts, my fantasies into your head? I might not even realize I'm doing it. It might be completely unconscious. How can I ever know?" 

 _"I_ know. I know it's real," Hawke repeated stubbornly. "I love you. Really. It's real." 

He tried to fill his tone with as much conviction as he could muster, but he wasn't sure that Anders was buying it. Instead, he looked over at the monitors again, and his smile softened, became less brittle. "But with Fenris..." he started, then shook his head ruefully. "What he says is what he _really_ feels. I can be sure of that, because I know I'd never in a thousand years want a lover as stubborn, pig-headed, contentious, prickly, bigoted --" 

"Whoa now," Hawke objected. 

" -- as that bloody elf," Anders finished. Despite the cantankerous words, his smile broadened. He squeezed back, returning Hawke's grip on his hand. "So as long as he's around, in his own inimitable way, I know that I'm not... hurting anyone. I know that I'm safe, safe with you, safe to be with you. I know that what the two of you feel for me is real. I'm _glad_ he is the way he is -- and I wouldn't want him to be any other way."

 

* * *

 

The hull repairs were set in silicon by the next morning, and they were ready to continue their journey. Fenris snoozed through most of the next Fade trip; it was actually a short hop, no more than eighteen hours spent navigating the other realm. It was strange to think of this leg of their trip as being a 'short' one, since if they'd tried to traverse the distance through normal space, they'd all have died of old age before reaching their destination. 

Hawke spend most of the day reviewing the data Varric had dumped into their computers for this job. There wasn't much ; he studied the map of the area, a three-dimensional image overlain with data points. The region was mostly notable for its landmarks, a series of brightly colored dust columns that rose up from unfathomable deeps like some ancient sea plants. There were no habitable planets nearby, and no notable industry; travelers occasionally used it to break long Fade journeys due to its distinct visuals, but with so much dust in the area -- and the accompanying threat of DMAs -- few cared to linger. 

A handful of passing ships had sighted their ghost ship, and one bold adventurer had gone in search of it, but each time it just retreated until it was out of sight. That spoke to Hawke of some kind of stalk or ambush planned -- but if so, it had been going on for months now and never actually attacked anyone. What was their endgame? Maybe they were refugees? On the run from something, or someone? Deserters, fleeing some lost battle? Some new sort of cult? 

If they really were Andrastean Federation, the Federation had no lack of friends in that part of the galaxy -- and if they were deserters, the Federation had no lack of enemies either. More to the point, there were universal rules about ships in vacuum aiding other ships that were stranded or damaged, which even the Consortium abided by. If it was help they needed, they should have been able to get it by now.

A jolt of queasiness shook him out of his study, and a strident tone sounded on the bridge as the lights changed from green back to normal. _We're back out of the Fade._ They had reached their destination, and he still had nothing but questions. 

Hawke re-assumed command of the Lady Amell, quickly running scans of the surrounding area and using them to incrementally update the computer's maps. There weren't many discrepancies -- a few floating pieces of space trash here and there, the nearly imperceptible shift of the dust columns. No sign of any other ships, ghost or no. 

Well, he hadn't expected to find it just waiting for them. Hawke studied the new map one final time, calculating angles and vectors in his head. Nodding to himself in decision, he called up the ship's store of remote grav probes and began to launch them, programming them to spread out in a loose net over the area. They couldn't see inside the dust clouds -- of course -- but they could give him a much better, clearer, and more up-to-the-minute view of the surrounding area. 

Probes launched, Hawke set the navigation computer of the Lady Amell to begin a search pattern of the area, and settled in to wait. 

The first hit came a few hours later -- barely a tickle against his sensors, but it was a hit nonetheless. He immediately altered course to try to get a better read on it, but it swerved away and disappeared. Still, Hawke tapped the hit into his computers, and tightened his search pattern. 

The next few hours turned into a frustrating game of cat-and-mouse among the field of dust columns. He would get a glimpse of their quarry -- or his probes would -- only to have it retreat into a dust cloud or dodge out of sensor range. He'd added only a handful of readings and pictures to his file on the mysterious ship, none of which made its behavior make any more sense. He needed to get closer.

Hawke frowned, drumming his fingers on the deck console. He was confident that the Lady Amell was faster than the target ship -- she was faster than most ships the size of their quarry, and the ghost ship had obviously taken damage. That would slow it down. But being fast enough to catch up with it wasn't going to help if the blasted thing wouldn't hold _still._ There were no walls or corners in deep space to pin it up against; how could you surround a target with only one ship? 

He paused, arrested by a thought. The few readings he'd been able to get on the ship showed it to be a hulk, holed and lifeless. There was nothing left alive on this ship, and yet it kept moving. Ghost stories aside, that had to mean it was being controlled by a computer. A computer that was obviously acting on some pre-programmed instructions to avoid contact with other ships. 

He called up his tele-links to the remote probes, accessing their base programming, and made a few artistic alterations to their radio profile. While in reality they were unchanged -- little can-shaped hunks of metal with no more than a booster and a transmissions platform -- their telemetry signatures now _looked_ like other ships, copies of the Lady Amell. 

As soon as the signatures changed, the ghost ship abruptly reversed its course, swerving away from the nearest remote probe. Hawke urged the Lady Amell into motion, calculating a new approach and angle -- one designed to herd the ship into a box where it would be surrounded by the remote probes on all sides. 

It took half an hour of cursing and white-knuckled twists and turns, but eventually he had his quarry right where he wanted it. The remote probes formed a tetrahedron in space which the Lady Amell maneuvered their prey up against. It retreated before his advance, slipping into the cover of a dust cloud in the space between the ships -- and stopped. 

Hawke grinned with triumph. Faced by five suspiciously identical signals, a human pilot would have guessed the ruse -- or even just looked out the window to see that the other four 'ships' were nothing of the sort. But a computer wouldn't know to do that. " _Got_ you," he said triumphantly.

"What have we got?" Fenris' familiar voice said from the doorway, and Hawke nearly jumped out of his skin at the tension. 

"Fenris," he greeted as the elf came into the room, and looked over his shoulder at the space map. Fenris hummed in approval. 

"I could tell by the terrible things your maneuvers were doing to the engines that we were in pursuit," Fenris said by way of explanation. "When they stopped, I assumed we had too. This is our prey?" 

"Looks like it," Hawke said, pushing the space map aside to pull up the best scan he'd gotten of the target ship. It was still a picture full of holes, low-resolution and tattered thanks to the shrouding dust, but it was the closest look they'd gotten to their quarry so far. "It's a mess, but it's still running somehow -- at least enough to power the engines and a navigation comp." 

He zoomed the image out to the maximum size the display could manage, enough that the edges began to look rough and angular with the limits of the scan resolution. 

"So what do you think?" Hawke asked, glancing up at Fenris' intent expression. "Is it an Andrastean Federation vessel, like Varric theorized? Or what?"

 Fenris glanced back at him, one eyebrow raised. "Why are you asking me, Hawke?" he said. 

"I don't know, because you know more about ship hardware than anyone else on this boat?" Hawke huffed, and Fenris chuckled.

 "That may be, but my familiarity is primarily with Tevinter hardware, not Andrastean. I can tell you this is not a Tevinter design, but I haven't spent enough time around Andrastean ships to tell you if it is one of theirs." 

"I have," a voice spoke up unexpectedly from behind them, and both men turned to see Anders standing in the doorway, squinting a bit in the light. He wandered forward, covering a yawn with his hand, and took a cursory glance at the ship. "Oh yeah. That's Andrastean, for certain. Battleship, I'd say." 

Fenris rolled his eyes. "I could have told you _that,"_ he said disdainfully. "It's not large enough to carry cargo, but bigger than civilian ships." 

"But you didn't," Anders said smugly. He gestured towards the display, his fingers passing through the lines of light as he indicated a bulky central column. "See this? The same base structure that you'll find on every damn Council ship ever built. And all the other modules stack up around it. This one's especially fancy, though; I've never seen one like this before. And I've seen a _lot_ of Federation ships." 

"Maybe it was stolen, and the alterations made afterwards?" Hawke suggested. Fenris and Anders both shook their heads. 

"Nah, they use the same shiny chrome for the new parts as for the old," Anders said, and Fenris nodded confirmation. "Obviously, it is all initial installation." 

"Huh," Hawke said, mulling this over. "New model, then? Experimental design?" 

Anders looked doubtful. "Maybe," he said, "but what's it doing all the way _out here?_ All the Federation's shipyards are back in Orlais." 

Fenris made an impatient gesture. "It is pointless to sit up here and speculate," he said. "The answers, whatever they are, are down there. We have reached our destination; let us get to work." 

"Right." Hawke nodded, and turned back to the computer, preparing to queue up the computer codes that would take the _Lady Amell_ in. 

"What's this hunk of junk called, anyway?" Anders asked, squinting at the low-resolution model of their target. It was a computer reconstruction, of course, not an actual video, so the surface was dull and grey. "I like to at least know a lady's name before I plunder her secrets, if you know what I mean." 

Fenris snorted. Hawke grinned. "Not sure. I didn't check. Hang on," he said, and called back the datafile. It took a couple of minutes of hunting, but he eventually found a decent if slightly blurry shot of the ship's hull, towards the bow where the name had been painted. "Here we go." 

He shot it up to the main screen, and couldn't help a chuckle. "Just in case we were in any doubt that this was an Andrastean Federation ship," he said, pointing to the marred but still legible writing on the hull. "They called this one the _Herald of Andraste."_

 

* * *

  

They took their time getting suited up to head over to the husk; there was no particular rush, so there was no excuse not to check and double-check their safety protocol lists. They took armor, just to be safe, but left the heavy weaponry behind; Hawke took his preferred laser pistol and Fenris his nanoblade. There shouldn't be anything on the ship to shoot at, but one never knew. 

Somewhat to Hawke's surprise, Anders insisted on coming along. "If you need me, I don't want to be on the Lady Amell and out of range," he argued. 

"I am _absolutely positive_ I won't need you," Fenris shot back, and Anders only smirked. 

"Then you might need an extra pair of hands to carry the loot!" he exclaimed. 

Fenris looked at him, made a disgusted sound in his throat, and turned his back; an implicit admission that he was perfectly fine with Anders coming along. 

Anders took armor, and a medical kit in case of emergencies, but no weapon; of course, as an esper, he was never unarmed. Just because he didn't usually wield his powers offensively didn't make them less deadly. 

With careful maneuvering Hawke brought the Lady Amell alongside the decrepit hulk, then secured it in place with magnetic grapplers.  Up close, the ship was even more of a wreck; its hull was scarred and pitted, in several places gaping holes that showed right through the skin of the vessel to the skeletal struts beneath. There was no way it could be maintaining an atmosphere or gravity field, yet here and there along the surface faint lights flickered, revealing the last sputters of a dying generator. 

Suited and armored, armed and ready -- the three astronauts cycled out the airlock of the Lady Amell and crossed the vacuum between the two ships, making their way along the battered metal plating to the nearest airlock. Some of the holes in the ship's hull were so large that they could have walked right into them -- but that would be needlessly reckless. Exposed wires and conduits could prove a lethal hazard, and Maker only knew where in the ship's underbelly they would end up. Airlocks were always better, if they were working -- and since airlocks were usually a ship's system's highest priority, there was a good chance they'd be working. 

They were. The airlock's controls were sluggish, but with a combination of persuasion and percussion, Fenris managed to get the outer lock to cycle. It was a one-person lock; Hawke went in first, by habit hooking his tether to the attachment point inside the door, and punched the button to cycle the lock. 

The deck groaned and shuddered underfoot as he waited for the mechanism to cycle; it moved slowly, grudgingly, and Hawke was surprised to get even the weak buffet of air against his suit that indicated partial pressure. He glanced at his suit's readings; about thirty percent of an atmosphere seemed to be the best the _Herald_ could manage. They'd probably have to stay suited the whole time. The light changed from red to green and Hawke stepped forward, preparing to clear the lock for Fenris. 

Abruptly the light flashed back to red, and Hawke was slammed off his feet as the outer airlock door wrenched open. In a full atmosphere, Hawke would have been blasted outwards; as it was the rush of air ripped him off his feet and sent him spinning into space. 

Before he had time to do more than shout, he was jerked to a stop by the end of his tether; his stomach dipped and heaved as he struggled to counter the spin, to get his equilibrium back. 

"Hawke!" Familiar hands on his shoulder helped steady him, and Hawke took a deep breath as he found his footing again. He looked up to find Fenris gripping his arm and shoulder, his green eyes blown wide behind his glass faceplate, and Anders hovering worried in the background. 

"I'm fine," he said, and saying it helped him believe it, himself. 

"If you hadn't been tethered --" Anders began. 

"Then I still would have had my maneuvering jets," Hawke interrupted, beginning to feel steadier. "This ship is in pieces. It's no surprise that the systems are malfunctioning all over the place. We'll keep going, and be more careful." 

With a bit more work -- and the airlock would never be the same again -- Fenris managed to jam it open so that the three of them could enter single file. The airlock opened up to a corridor on the other side -- larger than the hallways on the Lady Amell, but otherwise basically familiar in form and function. The gravity was out -- little surprise -- so the space was full of little bits of floating dust and debris, metal shards or paint flecks or little blobs of unidentifiable frozen liquids. There was no air, and perforce no sound; but through the soles of his feet Hawke could feel the fitful groaning of machinery through the deck, as parts of the ship elsewhere struggled to function. 

Hawke keyed up the scan they'd gotten of the ship's exterior form, overlaid with blueprints from known Andrastean warship models to give them a best guess map of what they'd find inside. He studied the map, turning it to orient themselves to their current ingress. "Bridge or engine room first?" he asked. 

"Engine room," Fenris replied. "If there is anything on this ship to be of profit to us -- lyrium stores or proprietary technology -- it is likely to be there." 

"If it's tech we're after, it might just as likely be on the bridge," Anders opined. "As well as some clue as to what this ship is and what it's doing here." 

"Either way, we'll likely need to get to this corridor," Hawke pointed to a line on his map, "and go further towards the median. We can start our sweep on the way -- check the rooms for anything of value, but don't take it yet. We'll pick it up on our way out." 

The other two voiced their agreement, and the three of them started along the twisting corridors deeper into the ship. 

Hawke had been on many dead ships since he'd picked up salvaging as a career. It was unnerving, and depressing, to see an environment so familiar rendered dark and frozen and lifeless. But he'd gotten used to it, to the silence and the frozen rigidity, to the serenely floating debris, even to the bodies. He wasn't sure what it was about _this_ ship that was putting him so on edge. 

Maybe it was the layout -- the hallways were strangely proportioned compared to what he was used to, taller and wider with an echoing emptiness like a cathedral. Maybe it was the fitful vibrations that transmitted to his feet through the floor, like the shuddering of some vast, sleeping animal. Maybe it was the feebly flickering emergency lighting along the corridor, which went out as they approached. 

This ship was dead. But not dead enough. 

They reached a ramp and went up it -- disorienting, since the gravity didn't let them actually feel a slope, merely the rest of the ship tilted at strange angles to them -- and it plateaued in a larger corridor above. Dim blue lighting flickered, then plunged into darkness; they turned their headlamps on to illuminate the space. 

"Left for bridge, right for engine room," Hawke reported. 

"There's a door here," Anders called back, heading over to the other side of the broad hallway. "Not on the map." 

"That's not surprising -- we can only expect the general outline to be accurate, not the specifics," Hawke commented. "Could be a closet." 

"I don't th --" Anders' sentence cut off mid-word as he jerked to a halt. The doorway he'd been reaching for, which had been wedged half-open, suddenly slid slid. 

"Okay…" Hawke said slowly. "That was strange." 

"A computer glitch," Fenris said with a shrug. He turned right, playing his light over the hallway that led towards the engine room. 

There was another shadowed doorway on his side of the hallway. On an impulse, Hawke moved towards it, trying to get a glimpse of what lay beyond. 

Before he could reach it, the door slammed shut in his face, sending a faint reverberation of impact through the deck at his feet. 

"Well," Anders said after a stunned moment. "Seems like something really doesn't want us to explore the ship." 

"Are you sure it's just a computer glitch?" Hawke asked Fenris uneasily. "Could that account for it?"

"It is… still the most likely possibility," Fenris said, although his voice was disturbed as well. "I still believe we should proceed to the engine room. From there, we can take control of the ship's power, and shut it down fully if we must. And… if there is anything on the ship that was shielded from our scans, it would be there." 

The implication was left hanging; they'd sensed no life on this ship. So if someone _was_ still alive, that was the only place it could possibly be. And if there was nothing… 

They headed towards the engine room, Hawke becoming increasingly aware of the creaking and shuddering frame of the ship underfoot and overhead. Doors continued to slide shut as they passed, and the lights that shut off as they neared flickered back to life in the darkness behind them. 

At last they reached the engine room, with no further mishaps. The door was closed -- of course it was -- and locked. After a few attempts at forcing it proved fruitless, Fenris pulled the cover off the circuitry panel beside it and got to work. His silver implants lit up as he worked, the lyrium circuitry in them powering his attempts to connect and override the ship's systems. 

The door slid open, releasing a draft of air -- there had still been pressure in the engine room, but not much. Inside it was dark and cold as a tomb, only a few patches of light coming from intermittent panels and status lights. Empty. Hawke let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding. 

Fenris went straight to the console, plugging in directly; with his implants he could both power the console and also isolate it from other computer systems, giving him unrestricted access to the contents. Meanwhile, Hawke helped Anders start to disassemble some of the paneling in order to access the lyrium core, drained but still worth twice its weight in platinum. 

"Still no sign of the crew," Anders observed. "Think they bailed out somewhere back there?" 

"Maybe," Hawke said, although he wasn't holding out too much hope. "You'd think they'd have come back for their stuff, though." 

They hadn't been working for more than five minutes before Fenris made a thoughtful 'huh' noise. "Strange," he said. 

Hawke looked over at him to see his brow furrowed, lips turned down as he paged through the logs. "What's strange?" he asked. 

Instead of answering right away, Fenris dismissed the file he was viewing and called up another, scrolling through it rapidly. "This isn't right," he said, apparently half to himself. "This is..." 

Hawke waited impatiently for Fenris to decide to clue them in. After a minute more Fenris looked up at them. "This is impossible," he declared firmly. "Or... someone has a very strange sense of humor." 

"Fenris, are you going to explain or just keep making cryptic comments?" Hawke said, exasperated.

"Sorry, Hawke," Fenris said, still looking perturbed. "I've... never seen anything like this before. I pulled up the event log, to try to get a sense of what happened to the ship… how long it had been dormant, but…"

"What, you can't read them?" Hawke said, surprised.

"It's not that." Fenris shook his head. "Logs are logs. What doesn't make sense is the timestamps."

"Timestamps?"

"Yes." Fenris looked grim. "According to these logs, the _Herald of Andraste_ won't be launched for more than ten more years. Hawke, these timestamps are from the future." 

For a moment, silence reigned in the engine room. Anders broke it, clearing his throat. "That's impossible," he said.

"Yes, that's what I said," Fenris said acidly.

"Unless... someone altered the logs?" Hawke theorized. "It couldn't be that hard, could it? Just fiddle with the onboard computer's clock."

Fenris gave him an extremely pained look that described, more eloquently than words, just how foolish his blithe statement had been. "That is… not how it works," was all he chose to say on the subject. "As for the logs being altered? It could be done, yes, but it would require someone to go in and change the timestamps on _every_ log, individually, by hand. I'm at a loss to explain why anyone would."

Anders looked around at the shattered engine room, as though expecting to find some answer in writing. "Maybe this whole thing is some grand performance art installation?" he said. "People have done weirder things for art."

Hawke stood up, setting the tools he'd been using to strip the lyrium core back in their places. "I think we need to see what's on that bridge," he said. "If there are answers, that's where they'll be." 

The three of them trooped out of the engine bay and made their way up along the spine of the ship towards the bridge. Along the way Hawke tried several more doors and cross-corridor hatches, but they all remained stubbornly shut. 

He couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched, the hair-prickling sensation on the back of his neck that unfriendly eyes were on them. He could still feel the intermittent shudder and grind of the dying ship underfoot, and the motions seemed to follow them along the corridor. Hawke was beginning to seriously consider withdrawing -- but they couldn't come all this way just to leave without a payload to show for it, not because of a few minor computer glitches. 

About halfway through the ship they reached a checkpoint, a large heavy airseal door that blocked further progress. According to their crude blueprint, the bridge was somewhere beyond this door. Hawke tried to key the door open without much hope; when that failed, they tried to shoulder it open with brute force. No luck. 

"Right." Fenris stepped back from them and drew out his nanoblade, removing the protective sheath. "Clear the way. I'm going to cut through the door." 

"That will destroy any hope of an atmospheric seal," Hawke objected, and Fenris shrugged. 

"The ship is buggered all to hell anyway," Anders observed, stepping well clear of Fenris' swing radius and leaning against the wall. "Might as well." 

Surrendering to the inevitably, Hawke followed him, moving out of Fenris' way so that he could make his cut. The elf took a careful measure of his target, then drew his arm back to swing -- 

\-- and then a sudden impact shook the corridor, as the hatch to the nearest corridor behind them slammed shut. Hawke rocked as the space around him suddenly roared to life, buffeting the three of them nearly off their feet as air rushed to fill what had a moment ago been only vacuum. 

With air, came sound. It started off as a thin, faraway noise, that grew and sharpened as the atmosphere in the corridor thickened. " _Get out!"_ it shouted angrily. " _I won't let you! I won't let you hurt my friends!"_  

"Maker's balls!" Hawke shouted, his heart nearly jumping out of his chest as he smacked against the wall, looking wildly around for the source of the voice. "What _was_ that? _Who_ is that?" 

 _"They've been hu-urt enough,"_ the voice said. It was hard to place, distorted by static and by fury, but it sounded like a young man's voice, a light unsteady tenor. _"I won't let you hurt them any more. Get o-ut!"_

"No -- listen," Fenris said, neck craned to stare upwards at the ceiling. "That voice -- it's not human. That is a computer, these are pre-programmed responses." 

"Apparently programmed by someone with a strange sense of humor," Anders said, sounding shaken and trying to cover it with humor.

"No, I'm not," the voice retorted, still echoing from everywhere and nowhere. "And I think that's pre-etty rude. You came in from that other ship outside, and you're not welcome here." 

The three of them exchanged startled looks, questioning each other for answers none of them had. Hawke directed his next question to the ceiling. "Then what are you?" 

There was a distinct pause before the disembodied voice answered. "I... I am the shi-ip," it said, sounding uncertain. "Or… maybe the ship is me? I'm not -- sure. I was supposed to take care of them..." 

The voice trailed off, then suddenly switched registers, the same voice playing in a smooth, pleasant tone like an advertising jingle. _"Priority Alpha, ensure the safety and well-being of the crew. Priority_ \-- I... I have to prote-ect them." It stuttered back into the choppy, staticky, unsteady diction of before.

"An Artificial Intelligence?" Hawke said, finally voicing the only possible conclusion.

Anders shook his head, amazed. "I've never encountered one this advanced," he exclaimed. 

"That's because they don't exist. Not on this level," Fenris growled. "Tevinter has been chasing AIs for decades, and even they don't have anything like this." 

"Are we supposed to believe that the Andrastean scientists cooked up something the Consortium couldn't?" Hawke said with disbelief, and Fenris scoffed. "I thought they had religious prohibitions against playing Maker."

"I know why you're here," the computer interrupted them, sounding angry and suspicious once more. "To smash. To ste-al. To hurt my friends. I'm not going to let you, so you'd better leave before I ma-ake you leave."

"That's not true. We're not here to break anything. I promise," Anders appealed. Not bothering to deny the charge of stealing, Hawke noticed, and wondered if the computer would. "I'm a mindmed; I'm not here to hurt anyone." 

There was a long moment of silence, broken only by the intermittent hiss of static from the unseen speakers. "You are a doc-tor?" the computer demanded, sounding suspicious. "Please confirm. During times of emergency, access to medical professionals cannot be denie -- Confirm."

"Uhh… confirm how?" Anders shot his lover a wide-eyed look, but Hawke could only shrug helplessly. "I could give you my COMSID, but somehow I think the Circle would have purged me already… there's my Specialist number. Four-oh-niner-niner-hotel-alpha-lima, um, dash-one-twelve. Would that do?" 

Another long silence; this one was punctuated by steady, rhythmic ticking noises from inside the walls -- metal rapidly heating up or cooling down, if Hawke had to guess, but he didn't know why. 

"Confirmed, you are a registered Specialist of the Grey," the computer said at last, and Hawke breathed again. "I ha-ave to let you in now. Please… please help my friends. They have been non-responsive for one thousand, two hundred and twe-nty-four hours." 

And with that, every door on the ship slid open at once. 

Hawke didn't know what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't that. Despite all his best efforts to brace himself, to steel his stomach and his nerves against the reality of a derelict shipwreck, he couldn't help but recoil. The room beyond was filled with floating objects, silhouettes dim-lit by fading LEDs, each one flash-frozen in a final moment of time. 

They'd found the crew.

* * *

 

~tbc...


	7. The Herald of Andraste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our heroes explore the derelict in search of some answers. What they find, though, only raises more questions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Major Character Death tag comes into play in this chapter (again, it's not our main three.) The first scene contains some fairly graphic descriptions of violent death, though it's all in the past. If you'd just as soon pass, you can skip down to the line break at the halfway mark and scroll up a bit to catch the last few lines.

 

"Sweet Maker…" 

Hawke wasn't sure which of them had uttered that; it could have been any of them, or all three. The heavy airlock door which they had struggled to open, now opened onto a scene from nightmare. 

On the other side of the airlock was a wide bay, an open space that encompassed a good volume of the ship from the core outwards. It was narrower towards the ship center and wider along the curved outer hull, a roughly trapezoidal space with more openings and doors along the edges. There was no atmosphere, and no possibility of one, as distant stars glimmered through ragged apertures punched through the outer wall. 

Littered around the bay were the bodies, floating in eerie serenity in their zero-g graveyard. They made up a surprising variety of sizes and shapes -- Hawke thought he could pick out several elves, and one bulky giant figure that could only have been a qunari -- dressed in heavy combat armor and obviously geared for a fight. A fight they'd found, and lost.

Every one of the bodies showed signs of violence; not all were whole. One of the bodies was missing a head, another severed limb floated in space yards away from its supposed owner. Blood was everywhere, painted in long arcs against the walls or hanging flash-frozen in the air. 

The three travelers stepped cautiously into the bay, playing their lights around the slaughter. Hawke swallowed against a slow rolling in his gut; he had faced dead bodies on derelicts many times before, but this was… this was another level. 

"What could have done this?" Fenris muttered over the comm.. "These wounds aren't from laser beams, or plasma bolts." 

"They were definitely mechanically inflicted," Anders said, his voice remaining steady despite the grayish pallor of his skin. He reached out and carefully gripped the shoulder of one of the floating bodies, turning it -- _her --_ over. His light played over her front, revealing a woman in the tags and colors of a Federation marine. She had black hair kept clipped practically short under her helmet, and the harsh light threw sharp shadows across her cheekbones. Her face was frozen permanently in a grimace -- of surprise, or fury, or pain it was hard to say. 

Her helmet was intact, but below the faceplate the rest of the body was a ruin: the spacesuit had been shredded along with the uniform and body beneath it. Great, violent rents tore across her front, ripping open her torso and giving glimpses of red-stained bone beneath. "But this damage doesn't look like a nanoblade. Nor a frag grenade, either. They almost look like claw marks." 

"Claw marks?" Hawke said uneasily. He thought back to their recent encounter with the space spiders. "They could have run into some local wildlife." 

Fenris was on the other side of the bay, examining the holes riddling the outer hull. "These gouges were not made by plasma fire, either," he said. "It looks like something… chewed its way through. The pattern is odd, though." 

"Odd how?" Hawke said, tearing his horrified gaze away from the dead woman. She'd been beautiful once, he thought, in a certain severe and hard-edged way. Now, she was just debris. She had an arsenal of weapons strapped to her sides, although none of them were in her hands; instead, she gripped the hilt of a weapon Hawke couldn't identify. It looked like the hilt of a sword, like Fenris' nanoblade, but with no blade to match. Broken? 

"Without knowing what did it, it's difficult to say," Fenris said, and Hawke could hear the grimace in his voice. "The holes are all over the place, obviously made by a number of opponents. But there are whole sections of the hull where they do not penetrate, too orderly to be an accident. It's like the attacks were… funneled in." 

"That makes sense," Anders said, turning away from his examination of another corpse, this one a bulky man with a flowing beard that nearly filled his helmet's faceplate. A hole had been punched through his torso, clean enough to see the wall on the other side of him. "I suppose. Pick your battleground, and make a stand where you want to, not where they want you to." 

"Until they were overwhelmed," Hawke said, and shook his head. "But by what?" 

 _"It was the demons,"_ a voice suddenly came over their comms, making them all jump and swear. "Maker's balls!" 

Hawke recognized the voice, though it was much louder and clearer than it had been out in the corridor. It was the computer-voice, the ship's AI; apparently, it had found a way to patch into their comm. network. 

"What do you mean, _demons?"_ Hawke demanded. 

 _"The demons,"_ the computer repeated, as though its words made perfect sense. " _They come from the breach. We were sent here to fight them, to make a sta-and. To secure the perimeter, to protect the platform."_ The metallic voice took on a hard, angry edge that made the hair on Hawke's neck prickle uneasily. " _But we were betrayed."_  

Over by the outer hull, Fenris made a "Huh" of discovery. He forced open one of the doors nearest to the hull, which was warped an corroded in its frame. " _Here_ was plasma fire," he said, shining his light over the room beyond the door. No light reflected back, as there were no walls left to reflect it, only slagged steel opening onto empty void. "This place took a direct hit from a military-grade cannon." 

He bent down, sifting his gloved hands through the slag and cinders that drifted over the floor, brushing carefully as he uncovered an irregular structure of blackened bone. "My best guess is that this was a gunnery emplacement -- would have had a crew of three or four." He pulled out a small, round object from the pile, and gently brushed away a few stray flecks of metal to reveal a humanoid skull. "Looks like an elf," he reported. "Female." 

Hawke walked along the inner wall, shining his light out into the battlefield and putting the pieces together. "I can see it," he said. "Set up a cordon with deliberate gaps, to draw your enemy into the crossfire of your guns. Marines stationed behind to take out any stragglers that get through." Which had worked fine until the guns were taken out, and then the infantry was swarmed under. "But I still don't understand who the enemy was. All the bodies in here look like ship's crew. The claw marks say wildlife, but the plasma fire says a human opponent." 

"Or a qunari," Anders added. 

Fenris shook his head. "Not Qunari. The Qun uses wave guns, not plasma fire," he said. He returned the skull to its resting place and stood, brushing his hands off on his thighs. "This is an Andrastean ship; most probably, their enemies were Tevinter." 

 _"Yes,"_ the ship confirmed. _"The Vena-na-na-to-to-t-ori."_ The pronounced stutter in the AI's voice grew suddenly much worse, skipping like a damaged mag disk over the word. Even without the distortion, Hawke hardly knew what it was supposed to mean. _"They inf - They were supposed to be our allies. To stand with us to face the Breach. To hold back the sky. But they turned on us. They **wanted** it to happen. Why would anyone **want** that to happen?" _  

"There _were_ Qunari here, but they were fighting with the Federation troops, not against them," Anders said. He crouched next to the body of the fallen Qunari giant, which wore a brightly-togged spacesuit that was definitely not Federation issue. The suit material that peeked out around his armor was a bizarre, green-and-pink pinstriped pattern. Whatever had killed him had ripped away much of his upper torso and the right half of his head, leaving a staring empty eye socket exposed to the void. 

"Tal-Vashoth mercenaries, maybe," Fenris said. 

Anders shook his head. "The Feds don't hire Vashoth mercenaries," he said. "They think they're all brutes or heretics." He shifted suddenly, shining his light closer to the gaping wound in the Qunari's neck. "Hang on. There's something here -- in the wound." 

There was, of course, no easy or graceful way to handle a flash-frozen corpse; the body jostled as Anders wrestled with it, dark lines appearing and running over the parts of its neck and shoulder that were still intact. Still Anders knew his business, and with minimum further trauma to the corpse managed to extract a long, serrated, glistening object from the wound. He turned his headlamp on it, turning it carefully over to try to make out the form, and then dropped it as he nearly jumped back from the body. "No!" he exclaimed, thoroughly piquing Hawke's interest (and his alarm.) "No, not _here_ …" 

"What is it?" Hawke asked, coming to look over his shoulder. It looked like it was made of glass, serrated along one edge with a bend at one end resembling a hook, and Hawke had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to be looking at. If it was a weapon, it was no weapon he'd ever seen before. 

 _"It was the demons,"_ the computerized voice repeated, just as unhelpful as before. 

"It's --" Anders broke off, and when Hawke spared a glance for his face he was white as a sheet in his faceplate. "No, I'm sure I'm wrong, just jumping to conclusions. It can't be that." 

"What can't it be?" Hawke prompted him, and Anders just shook his head. 

"Something that can't possibly exist outside the Fade," he said. He gave another uneasy glance at the floating corpse, then shook his head and moved turned away. He trailed a gloved hand through the air, then turned it over in his headlamp, rubbing his finger and thumb together. "But this means -- we were looking for the bodies of the attackers, but I think… Hawke, I think they're here." 

"Anders, you're not making any sense," Hawke said in frustration. 

"This --" Anders gestured at the floating blizzard of debris that littered the room. "I assumed it was all blood, or char, but it's not. The attacking… the attackers, this dust is what's left of them. They were vaporized, reduced to ash." 

"What kind of weapon could do that?" Fenris said irritably. 

"Good question," Hawke said, thinking of the strange bladeless hilt he'd seen in the female marine's hand. It was an exciting prospect -- a form of tech they'd never seen before, more than worth its weight in secrets for the trip they'd made out here. "A very valuable kind of weapon." 

To his surprise, Anders shook his head. "Not -- not necessarily," he said, still sounding subdued. "Not if I'm right. But then again -- I don't know. We don't know enough, yet."

 _"It was an experi-rimental model,"_ the computer voice chirped. _"Designed by the Professora, with some modifications by by by --_ Access denied. Information on file 'HFE Disruption Blade Model Beta' protected under patent revision until 9:60 Ano Diaspora." 

Hawke sighed. While the idea of an AI sounded like a good one, in practice it was being much less helpful than they could have hoped. He supposed this one was damaged, and wondered if it would be possible to extract its software and bring it along. 

He kept going. At the inner end of the bay was another door hatch, this one with a familiar look to it. Hawke recognized the markings and reinforcement around the door as belonging to a Fade bridge, like Anders' back on the Lady Amell, but bigger. The door was not locked, nor even -- when Hawke tried it -- sealed. 

He pushed the door open and turned his light on the bridge, and his heart sank into his boots. Three bodies floated in the space beyond, as stone dead and frozen as the mauled soldiers outside. One woman, two men, all three with dark skin and hair. One was an elf in plain ship's knits, neatly trimmed dreadlocks bound in a queue at the nape of his neck; the other man was human, dressed in a flamboyant style Hawke didn't recognize, a handsome mustache crusted over with ice. The woman was the darkest of the three, a silver headset on her close-shorn head, the rank and insignia of the Andrastean Federation marking her as a Circle pilot. 

There was not a mark on them -- but they wore no helmets. Their eyes were all boiled red, the expression on their faces showed the same frozen astonishment that Carver's had, in the pressure failure that had claimed his life. 

As a pressure failure in here had claimed these. 

"They should have worn their helmets," Hawke couldn't help but mutter, feeling the old helpless anger come crawling up the back of his throat. _He should have been wearing a helmet. He should have been wearing a suit. But we had only three, and he insisted that the biggest one didn't fit him, that I should wear it instead of him -- instead of him --_  

 _"They couldn't,"_ the computer's voice replied. _"They had to wear their headsets, to touch the Fa-ade."_  

"What were they doing tapping into the Fade?" Hawke said, bewildered. Had they been trying to escape into the Fade, make a break for it? 

 _"Calling the demons, to bring them in. Raising barriers, to keep them out,"_ the computer helpfully explained. 

 _Barriers?_ Hawke wondered; the other half of the sentence fit in well enough with their estimate of how the battle had gone. But it still didn't answer why it took three espers to man a single Fade bridge, or why they were wearing their headsets in real-space. 

He needed the others in here; Fenris might be able to make sense of the strange equipment, and Anders would have a better idea of what in the Maker's name they'd been trying to do with the Fade. He backed out of the Fade bridge, resisting the urge to shut the door safe and tight behind him. A good pressure seal wouldn't save them now, and there was always the possibility a lock would engage that they wouldn't be able to re-open. 

Not until he'd turned his back on the room did the thought that had been nagging him finally catch up. Secrecy patents, as a general rule, were never extended more than twenty years past their first filing. "Computer, when was the patent for this weapon originally filed?" he asked. 

 _"Filed by Professora DuFer in Parvulis, AD 9:40_ ," the computer promptly answered. _"With contributions from Doctor Fenavel Solas and Insignus Dorian Pavus of --_ Access denied." 

Hawke felt the uneasy tickle spread down his back and across his shoulders. He didn't recognize any of those names, aside from the latter being Tevinter in origin, but that didn't make them any less unsettling. "You can't still expect us to buy that 'fugitive from the future' story, can you?" he scoffed. 

 _"I don't understand what you mean,"_ the ship replied. _"There is no fu-uture. The breach broke open months ago."_  

Hawke just shook his head. His stomach still twinged uneasily, as much as he tried to smooth it back down with logic. The suggestion that this was all some kind of bizarre art project or massive practical joke was receding ever further with each dead body they found, unless they were artificially manufactured as well? No, that would require far too much contortions of logic to accept. 

Occam's razor. The simplest explanation was always most likely the truth. Whatever disaster had killed this ship, it was a perfectly normal, if grim, attack of wildlife or factional conflict somewhere on the other side of the galaxy from here. That they hadn't heard news of it before leaving on their journey didn't really mean that much; news travelled slow when it could travel only as fast as the fastest ship. 

The logs on the bridge would reveal the truth of what had happened here. Or else they wouldn't, if they were damaged or otherwise unhelpful. It didn't ultimately matter, because whatever had happened, it was in the _past,_ and Hawke didn't need to get involved. Didn't intend to get involved. They'd take whatever was valuable from this ship and move on, and if the AI tried to get in their way, they would shut it down. 

" _Warden Medic Anders?"_  the computerized voice said, and Hawke jumped a bit at the use of Anders' name. But of course, if the computer had been able to recognize his Specialist ID, that record would also include his name.

"Yes... computer?" Anders started to say, then broke off. "Do you have a name? It -- it feels weird to just keep calling you 'computer.' " 

 _"I don't know,"_ the computer said thoughtfully _. "My friends call me COLE -- for short. Computer Operated Logistics Enterprise 3151316, version 119, revision 5. Sometimes Sera calls me 'creepy,' but Doctor Solas says that's rude."_  

"Cole, then," Anders said. "What is it?" 

 _"Warden Medic_ ," the computer began again. _"Do you think you can help my friends? You're here, but they still won't respond."_  

Anders stopped for a moment, and Hawke saw the parade of emotions that crossed his face before he managed to get control of himself. "I'm afraid not, Cole," he said quietly. "I hate to say it, but it's much too late for them. Your friends are dead." 

 _"Dead?"_ The computerized voice went high with distress, disbelief, grief. _"That -- no! That's not right! Their files clearly state their status as 'living.' "_  

Hawke almost laughed, if only at the utter absurdity of it all -- thankfully, he was able to choke it down to a strangled noise in his throat. What would a computer understand about death, after all, except as a status field on a personnel file? 

"I'm sorry, Cole," Anders said, his voice soft and empathetic, his doctor-voice in spades. "I guess there was no one left to update the files after the ship was lost. But they're all dead." 

 _"That's not right -- That's not right --"_ The computer seemed to have caught itself in a loop. Despite knowing it wasn't a real person, Hawke's stomach twisted in sympathy at the shock and pain in that voice _. "I was supposed to keep them safe! I was supp --_ Protocol Alpha, ensure the safety and well-being of the crew," the voice flipped for a moment back to its smooth, melodic, canned recording tone, before dissolving into stutters and static. "Protocol alph -- _All dead -- all dead? That can't be, it can't be…"_  

The computer -- Cole, Hawke supposed he deserved at least the basic courtesy of a name -- trailed off, the volume of his voice dropping and disappearing behind the static. The emergency lights, already weak and unsteady, flickered and dropped to the barest pinprick of illumination, and Hawke felt the vibration under his feet shudder and halt. Uneasily he looked over at Anders, who had an expression on his face like he'd just kicked a puppy. 

"It's not your fault," he said, reaching out to clasp Anders' elbow through the suit. "We didn't make this happen. All you did was tell him the truth. The truth is always better, hey?" 

"Maybe," Anders sighed. "I just -- I wish there was something we could have done for them." 

"I know," Hawke said soberly. "But it's not ultimately our business, remember? We're just passing through. We're not here to fix the world." 

Anders made a face, but reluctantly nodded. Hawke gave him another reassuring squeeze, then let go. 

A sharp _crack_ reverberated through the metal plating underfoot; Hawke glanced over and saw that Fenris had managed to lever open the door to the gunnery emplacement on the opposite side of the gallery. He stepped inside, swinging his light around, and then stopped in his tracks. He stood there, not moving, for long enough for Hawke to wonder with alarm if he'd been attacked by something. 

"Fenris?" Hawke ventured. 

"Hawke," Fenris returned over the comm., his voice flat and grim. "Anders. I think you'd better get over here." 

"Is there danger?" Hawke's senses were now on full alert, and he started making his way over to Fenris' position as fast as he could in the treacherous terrain. 

"No," Fenris responded quickly, which was a relief, but there was a long pause before he followed that up with, "I think you need to see this for yourself." 

Anders' path converged with Hawke in time to hear this, and they both exchanged glances before hurrying over to the broken archway. It wasn't like Fenris to be mysterious, or play games. 

Fenris stepped aside to make room for them inside the doorway, although he kept his gaze focused. A brief glance around told Hawke that this room had also taken plasma fire, although a less direct hit than the other emplacement; the outer hull was still intact, although the atmosphere had long since leaked away through some other cracks. But it had still been direct enough to do its job: the blackened scar of plasma fire covered a full half of the room, with one of the three floating bodies charred beyond recognition. The other two had gotten off more lightly, sort of. 

Then Hawke turned to look at what Fenris was training his light on, and his heart nearly stopped in his chest. He heard Anders, behind him, choke out a strangled prayer as the recognition hit him too. 

The third body was shorter than the other two, bulky and heavyset in the way of the grav-worlders. The left half had been hit by plasma fire and charred to a cinder, but the right half remained almost untouched, and the face that stared back sightlessly in Fenris' light beam was that of Varric Tethras. 

It was unmistakably him. He had the same broken nose, the same heavy jaw -- with a few more scars having joined the ones around his visible eye. His face was locked in a rictus of pain, or determination; whatever it was, it looked like he'd died almost instantly. 

"Computer," Fenris said after a long frozen moment; his voice was strange. "Can you confirm the identity of this crew member?" 

There was only silence in response. Anders glanced up at the ceiling, as though the computer were contained there and not in the ship's core databanks. "Cole?" he asked. 

The comm. sputtered static for a moment, but no reply. "I think you broke it," Hawke muttered to Anders, uneasy. 

"I don't think we need the confirmation, anyway," Anders said. "Unless Varric has a brother --" 

"He does, actually," Hawke said, thinking back to his brief and unpleasant encounter with the senior Tethras. "But this isn't Bartrand." 

"This isn't possible, either," Fenris muttered. "We left Varric back on Kirkwall station! How could he possibly have gotten out here ahead of us?" 

Anders drew in a deep breath. "I think it's time for us to face the facts," he said, his voice deliberately calm. "There's no possible way. There's no way he could have gotten onto a derelict ship that's been dead for two years -- one which _he told us about,_ if you'll recall, in the time we were traveling." 

"You can't be suggesting --" Hawke started, but Anders raised his voice, overriding him. 

"Look at him!" he said. "Not just that he's here. He's older, too. Somewhere along the line he picked up more wrinkles, more scars, scars which healed over before he -- before he died. Time has passed. Years, Hawke. This all happened years ago." 

"Just like the engine logs," Fenris muttered. "How much evidence do we need, before we have to accept that the impossible -- time travel -- is the less improbable?" 

"It's not completely without basis in theory, you know," Anders said. "There's been speculation for years that the Fade could be used to travel not just through space, but through time. People have written whole theses about it! All abstract, purely theoretical -- but all science is theoretical, right up until it's not. This ship was doing _something_ with the Fade, I don't know what, but it's technology I've never seen before. It all adds up. We need to face facts, Garrett." 

 _Occam's razor,_ Hawke thought. The simplest answer was usually correct. 

But he didn't _want_ this to be the right answer, the simplest answer. Because the right answer was the one that left his friend dead, half his face burnt off in some kind of horrific apocalyptic space battle, and Maker, what could possibly have _happened_ to bring him here? To bring all this here? 

The computer, Cole, had spoken so casually of _demons,_ spoken of a breach, spoken of _betrayal._ Hawke had mostly dismissed the words, since the _how_ of how a derelict came to be there only ever an academic question to their line of work. But if it wasn't… 

"We need to get to the bridge," Hawke announced. "We need to find out what happened here." 

The other two didn't argue -- not even with each other, which more than anything spoke to how shaken they were. 

Before they left, though, Hawke searched the body for some kind of identification or token he could bring with him. They could do nothing for him in this frozen graveyard; no burial or memorial, not even closing those frozen eyes. But Varric had always kept with him… 

There it was. Just in case there had been any doubt remaining, there it was; a locket on a chain around his neck, engraved in gold, untouched by vacuum and time. A single rune was engraved on the front, the Dwarfish _berkanan._ He'd worn it around his neck for as long as Hawke had known him, and he'd never asked what was inside it. He didn't open it now.

The right half of the chain had melted into blobs of metal, but the locket itself was untouched. Hawke freed it easily enough from its chain, and slipped it into his salvage pouch. 

Wordlessly, the three of them backed out of the blasted gun emplacement -- the silent, frozen tomb -- and moved on.

 

* * *

 

The journey down the corridor to the bridge was uneventful -- almost creepily so. Fenris had acquired a more accurate ship schematic somewhere along the line, confirming the location of the main bridge near the stern of the ship along the main corridor. They passed by more doors on the way, leaving their contents unexplored. While they might come back later searching for valuables -- or clues -- right now, he wasn't in the mood for salvage. 

The corridor terminated in another large, heavy airseal door, this one appearing untouched. Fenris stepped forward to try it; like all the other doors, it was unlocked, but heavy and lacking in powered assistance. It took all three of them to budge the door, to slide it along its tracks and open to the bridge beyond. 

Compared to the slaughter in the gallery, the bridge was almost serene. It felt like a hushed office, clean and professional. The crew was still at their posts, most of them kept in place by the shock webbing designed to protect them from crashes: floating at consoles and displays as though they might return to their duties at any moment. 

Anders went to examine one of the bodies, bending down to play his light over a middle-aged woman with dark skin and curly hair, dressed in civilian clothes and sitting in front of a bank of dead comm. channels. "She didn't asphyxiate," Anders reported. "I'm… not sure what killed her, actually." 

Hawke glanced around, confirming what Anders had already seen: the corpses in this room lacked the typical mask of frost and blood-boiled eyes of pressure victims. While the bridge had lost life support eventually -- unable to support an atmosphere or heat even in sealed areas -- it had still been functioning when these people died. 

A few more steps brought them fully onto the bridge, rounding the dais to bring the captain's chair into view. Hawke heard Fenris' breath his through his teeth with surprise -- for the captain, slumped in his chair, had long and elegantly pointed ears. 

"An elf? Here?" Fenris exclaimed. "On an Andrastean vessel? I can hardly believe it." 

"Not just an elf," Hawke realized as he got closer. The elongated ears and subtly altered eyes and nose made his heritage obvious, but the body in the chair was tall -- probably would have been taller than Hawke standing up, maybe even taller than Anders. The faint lines of tattoos tracing over his face, almost lost among the wrinkles, just confirmed the theory. "Dalish." 

"That's unheard of," Anders said with some surprise. "Unlikely enough to find a Dalish elf on a Fed ship at all, let alone in command." 

"Not just command of this ship," Hawke realized, studying the arrangement of the captain's chair and glancing at the man's uniform for confirmation. _H. AMERIDAN,_ the nametag read, below the rank insignia denoting a commander. "He was in charge of an entire squadron." 

"Unbelievable," Fenris muttered, and Hawke could only agree. It was less than a century since the Exalted Fleet had been launched against the Dalish flotilla; though the deep-space elves had survived the purges, the grudges ran deep, and the propaganda had not yet faded from the consciousness of the Andrastean systems. Even if some dire extremity could compel an Andrastean-led expedition to accept a Dalish commander, what could possibly compel any Dalish to agree? 

"Maybe we'll find the answers in his log," Hawke said. He trained his light on the arm of the captain's chair, carefully moving aside the lifeless limb so he could examine it for a compartment. The chair was bigger than the one on the Lady Amell, fancier, with more buttons and channels… but all captains wanted to keep certain things close to hand, and it didn't take much searching before he came upon a flat square slightly raised from the rest of the plastic. It came away in his hand with a slight click, and he looked it over from all angles before he stowed it away in his pouch; from the outside it appeared just an ordinary data reader, the cover embossed with the same sigil as the commander's tattoos. "At the very least, maybe we can find out why Varric was on this ship." 

The others had moved away to begin their own investigations, Fenris fiddling with the computer access panels by the wall as Anders examined the bridge crew, trying to pin down a cause of death. "Well, this one is clear enough," he reported, straightening up from a gentle manipulation of a red-haired human woman. "Broken neck. Some kind of whiplash, I'd guess. What could do that in shock webbing, I'm not sure." 

Fenris grunted. "I've got playback," he said. "Perhaps this will shed some light on the mystery." 

"Well, let's have it, then," Hawke replied. 

Another moment wait while Fenris patched the audio system over their system's headsets; then the hum of noise filled their helmets, the background murmur of the crew's voices and faint susurration of living machinery. It was surreal, standing in the ruin of the ship as it was dead, and listening to when it had still been living. 

 _"Move up the_ Suledin," a voice said; deep, male, with an accent Hawke couldn't place and just a hint of the vibrato of age. But it was the note of authority, of command, that made this instantly recognizable as the voice of the mysterious Commander Ameridan. _"Close the gap left by_ Therinfal _. We can't let any of these demons through. What's the status on the platform?"_  

A female voice with a distinct Orlesian accent responded: _"Power levels are at 31% and increasing steadily, Commander."_  

 _"Good. We hold,"_ Ameridan said firmly. _"Be ready to redeploy if we lose any more ships."_  

"Damn, I wish I could see what's going on," Hawke complained. "Fenris, can you get a video to go with the audio?" 

Fenris grimaced. "I doubt it," he said, but bent back to the panel anyway. "Let me see what I can do." 

More normal bridge sounds, fuzzed by distortion and static, murmured through the playback. Hawke glanced over to see what Anders was making of it, but his other lover seemed curiously distracted. He wore an absent frown, gaze fixed on a spot on the… deck plating? 

"Anders?" Hawke asked, coming closer to him. 

"Something's not right here," Anders said under his breath. 

"You think?" Fenris shot back. "We're on a ghost ship lost in time, crewed with the bodies of our dead friends, with eyewitness recordings of the end of the universe, and you think something's not quite right?" 

Anders waved off Fenris' acid sarcasm, for once, not rising to the bait. "No, no, that's not…" He trailed off, a troubled expression on his face. "I can almost hear it," he said to himself. "Just a little more…" 

" _Damnation_." The sharp, bitten-off word fixed Hawke's attention back on the playback. _"Ambassador, hail the_ Calpernia _. Find out what that ass Samson thinks he's doing."_  

 _"Aye, sir,"_ a female voice murmured. Several more seconds of static passed as the distant voice counted up to thirty-two percent. Then the same voice, tinged with a distinct Antivan accent. _"Sir, the_ Calpernia _is refusing our hails."_  

 _"What th--"_  

A wash of white noise cut off whatever the unknown voice had been about to say, overriding all other sounds; it took Hawke a moment to realize that there had been an explosion. When the playback resumed it was to sounds of shouting, led by the voice of the Commander himself. _"Falon's black hands!"_ Ameridan swore. _"What hit us?"_  

 _"It's the_ Calpernia _, sir!"_ the Antivan-accented woman replied, her voice suffused with panicked disbelief. _"They're firing on us!"_  

 _" **What**? Are they mad?!"_ Ameridan shouted. 

 _"Traitors!"_ an unidentified male voice shouted in the background. _"Tevinter scum. We should have known not to trust them!"_  

Snarling under his breath, Fenris bent back to the panels, this time applying a considerably more vigorous force to its contents, yanking and banging on components inside. The viewscreens flickered, going from matte blackness to a deeper dark indicating an active tank, but still showed no image. 

All at once the screens sputtered to life, color and movement flooding the bridge in jerky animation as the audio log began to replay. The video tracked with the audio only for a few seconds before freezing entirely, stuck on a still image as the frantic voices of the dead crew filled their helmets. 

 _"Sir, we took a direct hit on the port gunnery!"_ a tinny female voice came over the playback. _"Total loss of crew in that compartment. We're down to our starboard guns!"_  

 _"Roll the ship!"_ Ameridan snapped out the command. _"Give them our belly!"_  

In the background, the Antivan woman continued to plead with unseen listeners. _"_ Calpernia _, please respond! Please, think of what you are doing!"_ she exhorted. _"_ Ocularum _, respond!_ Coracavus _, please --"_  

Another wash of white noise, this time with the sound of tearing metal and roaring flames in the background. The static this time didn't dissipate, but voices could faintly be heard shouting through it _. "Starboard gunnery is hit! All ranged fire capacity is lost. Sir, we're being overwhelmed! We have to fall back!"_  

 _"Take evasive maneuvers. Send damage control to get those guns back online, and reinforce the marines!"_ Ameridan ordered. " _We can't expose the platform to these traitorous ba -- "_  

The white noise increased to a deafening nothingness, blotting out all other sounds. In truth Hawke hardly noticed the replaying tragedy, so frozen was he in horror at the image displayed on the viewscreen. The recordings were external, not internal; they didn't capture the inside of the bridge, but instead what those on the bridge had seen in that one suspended moment. 

Nearby space around the ship was crowded -- with other ships, with debris, and with a stream of strangely organic and fluid figures that Hawke could hardly comprehend, let alone identify. Ranks of them varied from clear and colorless to a milky white as they flowed towards the ship, a formless and shifting mass within which one could almost make out details: here a set of talons, there a misshapen limb, over there a grotesque fanged jaw. To the right of the scene another ship was just beginning to turn towards them, fire blooming in a flash-frozen instant from its missile ports. 

But what dominated the viewscreen beyond any of these local concerns was the vast slash of green that hung in the distance, a discoloration of space that filled the sky. It looked like a whirlpool hung at a mad angle, clouds shot through with black lightning and searing sparks that swept away out of sight. Nothing, _nothing_ should have been that big, to fill so much of the arc of the sky; either it was close enough to reach out and touch, or else it spanned half the galaxy. 

"Andraste preserve us," Hawke said, his voice barely more than a whisper. "What _is_ that thing?" Fenris just shook his head while Anders stared, speechless; none of them had an answer. 

 _"It is the breach,"_ a familiar voice broke into their conversation, a flat and emotionless monotone. _"It swallows all. We were sent to stop it. To hold back the sky, to keep our universe from sliding into the Fade. But. We failed. We couldn't stop it. We. We were betrayed."_  

"The Tevinter ship," Fenris realized, turning to the frozen section of screen where the ship was just beginning to turn towards them, fire blossoming from its missile bays. "The _Calpernia."_  

 _"They shot at us. They were supposed to be our friends, but. They shot at us,"_ Cole said. It ought to have been said in anger, fury at the betrayal, but instead it was that same flat monotone. _"Multiple strikes, massive damage, hull integrity at 48%, pressure loss on central nacelle, fire containment systems offline, hostile entity breach on level 10, power dampers failing._  

"Protocol Alpha: ensure the safety and well-being of the crew. Protocol Beta, ensure that proprietary technology does not fall into enemy hands. _I had to get somewhere safe. But there was nowhere safe. I tried to find a clear path, but the only clear path went into the Breach..."_  

"That's it," Anders said, wonder and terror suffusing his voice. "That's how. He actually entered the Fade _physically_ …" 

Cole's voice slowed, low and haunting _. "Twisting, spinning, crushing, so **dark**. I tried to find a way through - This was the only way. But when I got here, it was already too late. My friends are dead - I failed - We all failed. It's too late."_  

"But it's _not,_ " Hawke said aloud, realization beginning to dawn on him. "It's not late. It's _early!_ This, this _breach,_ it hasn't happened _yet!_ Don't you realize what that means? We can still change things!" 

Fenris stared at him in disbelief. "How?" he said. 

"Hawke!" Anders started from his near-reverie, grabbing Hawke by the arm with fierce urgency. "We have to leave. Now." 

Hawke turned towards his lover with a question half-formed, but it froze on his lips as he saw inside the other man's faceplate. 

Anders' eyes had turned white, the pupil and iris nearly indistinguishable from the whites of his eyes. It was a sight Hawke had only seen once before -- when they had nearly run head-first into a nest of Dark Matter Aberrations in the Sigma sector. 

Dark Matter Aberrations, which grew and concealed themselves from the light of the suns in protective clouds of dust -- like this one. 

"DMAs," Hawke breathed. 

Like speaking the name of the devil, the one word broke the frozen dismay that had gripped the bridge. Fenris burst into action, moving rapidly around the bridge as he collected his gear, pulled things out of the walls seemingly (though certainly not) at random and stuffing them in his bag. There was no more time for a careful download of the ship's tech and data; they were in evacuation mode now. 

Unless… Hawke whirled and made a lunge for the ship's navigation panels. They were all but dead, their glow muted and unresponsive to his attempts to get a response. "Cole!" Hawke called out, trying to raise the ship's AI. "Give me the nav. We've got to move you out of this dust cloud, out of the way of danger." 

 _"I'm sorry,"_ came the ship's reply, eerie and emotionless. _"I'm afraid I can't do that."_  

"Why not?" Hawke demanded. "The Dark Matter Aberrations are coming! They'll destroy this ship and everything on it, and you too. Move!" 

 _"I don't have the po-ower_ ," Cole said. _"System reserves have been drained… too far. There's not enough left to restart the en-engines now."_  

"If we got back on the Lady Amell, found a way to transfer you an emergency jolt of power --" Hawke started. 

Anders cut him off with a shake of his head. "There's no time for that," he said. 

 _"It doesn't matter,"_  Cole said calmly. _"There is no pu-urpose now. My friends are all dead. We failed… our mission. There's nothing left to save."_  

"Hawke," Fenris interrupted him. His satchels were full, harsh lines straining at the fabric of the bags with all the components he'd taken. "We don't have time for this. We have to go." 

Hawke agonized for another precious second of time, but he knew they were right. Grey Specialists could give warning of the DMA's approach -- they were the only things in the known universe that could -- but the warning was measured in minutes, not hours. Once on the move, the DMAs moved deadly fast, and there was no recourse once they'd caught up to you. 

But leaving the ship behind meant losing all the records of the doomed future, all the evidence of what they'd found, save what they could carry away with them. Once they left the ship, it would be lost for good. 

Until time came around to bring it here again… 

"Cole," Hawke said, coming to a decision in that moment. "I swear, we'll find a way to make this right. We'll find a way to make sure this never happens." 

 _"Never happens?"_  Cole repeated. 

"Yes," Hawke said. "This, all this, we'll fix it."

There was a long pause -- it was only seconds, but it felt like hours, each one ticking by in an eternity. "Hawke!" Anders shouted at him from the bridge door. "We have to _go!"_  

But Hawke waited, and finally Cole responded: _"My friends… they won't be dead? They'll be al-alive?"_  

"If there's any possible way, then yes," Hawke promised. "I'll make sure of it." 

 _"Then…"_ Cole's voice dropped to a whisper, barely a shadow of a sound _. "Maybe I did save them, after all."_  

And with that, the lights on the console went dark.

 

* * *

 

The rest of the away mission went by in a flurry of raw nerves, the adrenaline surging through their systems making each passing minute stretch unbearably. Yet for all the tension and frenetic hurry, it was actually less than a quarter of an hour before they were cycling through the lock to the _Lady Amell,_ Hawke keying in to rev up the systems before he even set foot in the ship. 

They scattered: Fenris to engineering, to prepare the engines for maximum boost, Hawke to the main bridge, Anders to… do whatever it was Specialists of the Grey did to try to block or repel the advances of the DMAs. They fell into their routine with the precision of well-oiled gears, and soon the Lady Amell had reversed heading and was boosting out of the dust cloud at maximum acceleration. 

In the end they'd had plenty of time. They'd been underway for over an hour, the sight of the _Herald of Andraste_ dwindling to a fuzzed pinprick in their viewscreen. Hawke had been tapped into the remote drones, left behind in their hurry, so he saw it when it happened: 

The silhouette of the battleship, the broken and jagged pieces standing clear and remote against the blackened sky, began to fuzz over as though seen through a mist. At first it could be mistaken for a cloud obscuring the view, or perhaps an instrument failure -- until the outline of the bulky ship itself began to soften and corrode. Slow at first, then with a geometric rapidity, the ship's surface sloughed off and degraded into nothingness like spun sugar dipped into water. Tons of reinforced titanium-steel alloy seemed to churn and boil, seen dimly in the dark heart of the conflagration, and the radiation sensors on the remote drone pegged the needles, flashing wild and urgent alerts… 

And then there was nothing. Just a cloud of hazy dimness hanging in space, barely even discernible from the void behind it. Nothing, until the remote probe itself abruptly ceased to transmit, to respond to pings, and then to exist. 

As though it had never been there at all. 

Hawke touched the arm of his chair, the alcove where he had stashed Ameridan's last logs. Once they were away to safely, back in the protective light of the stars, then… then it would be time to hear about their future.

 

* * *

 

~tbc... 


	8. The Known Universe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Moving on and making plans, the crew of the Lady Amell return to Kirkwall to seek reinforcements.

 

Hawke watched Kirkwall slowly growing on his monitors, from a bright point of color to a flat distant circle, then a shaded orb. From this angle of approach, half the planet was lit by sunlight, one greenish-white icy pole angled towards them and the other hidden in shadow. At their current distance it was impossible to make out the cities and signs of human habitation that marked the planet, and the space station was lost in the planet's shadow. 

 _How strange that when I look out my window, I can see it glowing like a dim sun on the horizon. When first I arrived on Haven station, it appeared only as a bright star…_  

Today would be the seventh day in space since they had left the Serpent Nebula, the bright columns of dust serving as grave markers for a ship that no longer existed, that should never have existed. They could have made the trip faster, but Hawke was determined not to risk either his ship or crew, nor potentially unpleasant contact with authorities. The data they carried was too valuable for that.

 Over the last six days they'd had plenty of time to review all the data they'd collected from the _Herald of Andraste;_  the logs Fenris had managed to pull from the computer banks, their own suit's recordings, and Ameridan's diary.

 Combined, they painted a stark and terrifying vision of a world that Hawke had never wanted to see, yet couldn't stop seeing when he closed his eyes. That hole in the sky, the slashing green whirlpool draining off into nowhere. _It is the Breach,_   Cole had said, and for all the thousands of pages of datafiles and hours of recordings, there was nothing Hawke had yet found that explained it any better than that.

 For all the grim vision it presented, their view of the future was still patchy, full of holes. Fenris had made shrewd guesses about the locations of _Herald of Andraste's_   filebanks, but he hadn't been able to get them all. Of those he had managed to save before the ship was destroyed, some were encrypted beyond their ability to decipher, others corrupted beyond their ability to recover.

 Hawke had spent more time reviewing Ameridan's diary, which had been protected only with the simplest of biometric locks, and recovered almost whole. But even that had not proved as enlightening as he'd hoped. The Dalish commander had been recording only for his own benefit, not that of an audience, and he had not bothered to review facts that, to him, were common knowledge. The ship's datafiles, being tactical and technical data more than historical archives, were even less useful.

 The result was that they had been able to piece together only the vaguest outline of the political machinations which had gone so suddenly out of control, the error of judgment that had spiraled so quickly into horrific catastrophe. The disaster that tore open the very fabric of reality itself, starting normal spacetime into a terrifying inexorable slippage that threatened to pour all of their universe into the Fade.

 All of it. The technical files, and Ameridan's own recollections, were in emphatic agreement on this point. _All._   No local catastrophe this, no localized spell of inimical weather. Every planet, every star, every galaxy, every cloud of dust; every city, every ship, every man, woman, and child living and breathing and hoping and fearing and dying and struggling in all the known galaxy. Every horizon, explored and unexplored, every alien race from the Qunari to a thousand unknown others they'd never had the chance to meet; every plant, every animal, every chunk of rock. All.

 It was strange, having buried himself in the last week in the point-by-point minutiae of the end of the universe, to see the old ball of radioactive dirt and haze hanging right where he'd left it. Kirkwall grew slowly, imperceptibly in his vision, until he was just able to make out the sparkling glitter of Hightown Station in the planet's shadow. It was all still here; peaceful, serene, wealthy, impoverished, corrupt as it ever was. Hawke tried to imagine the viewscreen with no planet, no stars beyond, no sun; the patch of space empty, stripped even of _space._  

 He found he could do so with very little effort, and the exercise left him queasy. He turned away.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Varric had been pleased to see them again, greeting their return to Kirkwall with his usual jovial hospitality. Hawke hadn't volunteered any details of their recent excursion over the comm. and Varric hadn't asked for them; that was typical enough, the dwarf preferring to keep any discussion of products and profits to a private venue with fewer ears about.

 For this meeting Hawke went alone, leaving Fenris and Anders behind to begin their own preparations. He needed to see Varric in private first, to convince him of the truth and the importance of what they had found… because if he couldn't convince Varric, who'd known and trusted him for years, then there was no hope at all. Their data was too incomplete, too full of holes; it was not, by any rigorous standard of the word, _proof_   of anything at all. Given how tenaciously he himself had clung to denial, excuses, alternative explanations even with the cold bloodspattered reality all around him, he knew that to everyone else in the galaxy second-hand evidence would be no better than none. 

"Hawke! You're back!" Varric exclaimed, tossing his data-reader onto a nearby seat as the door hissed open. He looked up at Hawke with a warm, friendly smile… a familiar one, so familiar, so _unchanged._   No mysterious nicks or scars, no… no damage. "Find anything good on our ghost ship?" 

"Well…" Hawke said slowly; now that he was here, he found himself at a loss for how to begin. "Not as much as we would have liked; the derelict was… was destroyed not long after we found it." 

"Shame," Varric said with a grimace. "Tell me you recovered the lyrium core, at least?" 

"We did get that," Hawke agreed. "But that's not really the most… significant thing we found. Fenris pulled some of their databanks which seemed…" 

"Oh ho!" Varric actually rubbed his hands together, a familiar challenging gleam in his eyes as he reached for a notepad. "The best part. I always say the most valuable loot of all is a good story. A mystery like this, must have some great revelation!" He looked up, expectant. "So tell me, Hawke, what was the story?" 

He wasn't going to find a better opening than that. Hawke took a deep breath, and said in a carefully rehearsed tone; "It was a battleship from ten years in the future, sent back in time by a rip in the fabric of space that threatened to destroy the universe, crewed by corpses and steered by a broken AI." 

Varric let out a bark of laughter. "Hah! That's a good one," he said, paging through his notebook for a clear sheet. "No, but really. What was it? Some sort of experimental model? Council, Tevinter, or what? Did you find any encrypted files? Rare tech?" 

Hawke met his friend's gaze levelly. "I mean it, Varric," he said. 

A small frown creased Varric's brow, a pinch at the bridge of his nose, before he covered it with another wide smile. "Come on, I know you're putting me on." 

"I'm not." 

Varric shook his head. "Your sense of humor --" 

"Is taking a vacation right now," Hawke said, his voice flat and emotionless. He thought he understood Cole a little better now, how much easier it was to say the necessary things this way. "I saw some familiar faces on those bodies, Varric. I'm not in a mood to joke around." 

"Oh, really?" The smile faded, replaced by a growing frown, as Varric stared at him. The fingers of one hand drummed on the arm of his chair, a nervous, dissatisfied rhythm.  "And if I were to go check out this mysterious ship myself? Would I see some of these 'familiar' faces myself?" 

"You can't," Hawke sighed. "It strayed into a dust cloud, and the DMAs took it. Everything was destroyed except what we managed to carry out in our hands." 

Varric snorted in patent disbelief. "Oh, it's DMAs now?" he said sarcastically. "How convenient. This is starting to sound just a little beyond belief." 

"Well, that's the thing about real life," Hawke said, nettled despite his efforts to remain calm. "It doesn't rely on anyone believing it." 

"Don't try to bullshit me, Hawke," Varric said, iron creeping into his tone. "Fairy stories keep the universe from getting dull, but at the end of the day we're both businessmen. I was the one who gave you the tip-off, and you promised me a cut. Now. What did you really find on that derelict?" 

At least Varric was taking him seriously now. Hawke reached into his pocket, fingers closing around a smooth cold oval of metal, the roughness of the trailing chain. He pulled the necklace out of his pocket and tossed it over to Varric. 

Varric caught it automatically, giving the locket a cursory glance before his gaze was suddenly arrested. The dwarf went very still. 

"Where did you get this?" Varric asked, his voice suddenly rough, grating. 

"I already told you where I got it," Hawke said. 

Long seconds ticked past, held in stalemate, before Varric finally moved to open the locket. At this angle and distance Hawke couldn't see inside it, but whatever was there occupied Varric's gaze for a long, strained minute. 

At last Varric snapped the locket closed; he held it for a moment longer before he stowed it quickly in his desk drawer. As the drawer closed he looked up at Hawke, all traces of humor gone. "All right, Hawke," he said. "Keep talking."

 

* * *

 

 

They didn't normally stay in Kirkwall for more than a few days -- but then, nothing about this time around was normal. Varric pulled some strings to get access to a private, enclosed dock for the _Lady Amell,_   so as not to attract the attention of any more nosy Templars. Berthing for the _Lady Amell,_   and also for her crew -- more strings pulled get them some private rooms, far away from the gaudy hotel district, that nonetheless ended up being some of the most luxurious he'd ever seen. 

Not that he spent much time in them. For the next two days, Anders and Fenris roamed the station in a pair while Hawke and Varric stayed closeted in Varric's offices, reviewing the data with a fine-tooth comb. Varric was more serious than Hawke had ever seen him, and while he didn't ask what was in that locket, it had made a true believer out of his friend. 

But he only had the one locket, and the larger problem still remains. "Shit, Hawke," Varric sighed near the end of the second day, running a broad-fingered hand through his auburn hair. "I just don't see it. I don't think you've got anything that we can take to a court of law, or win over any serious skeptics. Any of the digital stuff could have been faked." 

"It's not," Hawke said, voice a little more on edge than he would have liked. The past week and some has worn on him more than he wants to admit, to the point where even his lovers are avoiding him. 

"I know it's not. I didn't say I thought it was," Varric said in a reasonable tone. "I'm just saying that if _other_   people claim it's faked, there's not a damn thing we can do to prove otherwise. This is hard-hitting stuff, but it's not exactly evidence." 

Hawke nodded, tipping back in the chair and letting out a sigh. He knew they wouldn't be able to take what they knew to the authorities -- had known it before arriving at Kirkwall.  "You're right," he admitted. "We're going to have to find another way." 

Varric's attention sharpened on him. "Another way?" he said carefully. "You got some ideas, Hawke?" 

"One or two," Hawke told him. "But to start with, we're going to need a bigger crew."

 

* * *

 

 

It was pure luck that Isabela was still in-system -- or back in-system, as it turned out. The   _Siren's Fury_   had returned from Darvaraad with a cargo hold full of perfectly legitimate, non-pirated salvage just two days before the _Lady Amell_ had gotten back from the Serpent Nebula, and Hawke's transmission had caught her on her way back to the system limit. He hadn't said much, counting on Isabela's ferocious curiosity to bring her back in, and he'd been right. 

He waited to meet her at the end of the docking tube, the zero-g plastic tunnel that was the liminal space between ship gravity and space gravity. She came swimming up through the tube like a mermaid from legend, her dark curls floating out around her head like seaweed; the zero-g did no disrespect to the rest of her curves, either. "All right, Hawke, what's this about?" she demanded as she reached the end of the tube and floated to a stop. 

Hawke couldn't help but smile, although it made his face ache in ways it hadn't in over a week. "Don't worry, I'll spill the beans soon enough," he said. "Dinner and a show. Varric's ordered a fantastic spread from the Antivan caterer on the planetside, with wine to go with." 

An answering smirk lit Isabela's face, made her eyes spark like the glitter that covered her skinsuit. "I suppose that's worth at least an evening of my time," she allowed. "But the show had better be good." 

"Oh, it will be," Hawke sighed. He looked past her through the tunnel, hearing the sound of voices from beyond the curve. "Is it just you and Merrill still, or did you pick up a third?" 

Isabela's smile widened into a grin, and she gave a throaty laugh for no reason that Hawke could see. "Oh, we managed to scrape up another warm body," she said nonchalantly, and pushed off the wall to sail on past Hawke into the station. Once the way was clear, another body came round the docking tube curve, and Hawke came face to face with -- 

"Aveline?" Hawke said, astonished. She was an old family friend, although he hadn't seen her in years. They'd parted ways on Kirkwall after he'd won the prize, accompanying his mother and sister to Starkhaven. As he'd pursued his dream of becoming an independent ship's captain, she'd secured a post in the municipal guard, and steadily climbed up the rank ladder with a fierce determination.

Aveline had always, even in the bad old days, believed in law and order; to find her as a passenger on the Siren's Fury, which only managed to stay in the _grey_   areas of law at the best of times, was more than merely surprising. "What in the Maker's name are you doing on a smuggler's ship?" 

Behind him, Isabela burst into peals of laughter even as Aveline floated up to eye-level with him, a foreboding set to her jaw and a fierce glower on her brow. "Oh, you hadn't heard about that nasty slaver business?" Merrill's light familiar voice floated to reach him from beyond Aveline in the docking tube. "I guess you hadn't heard -- it all started with that trade manifest -- or maybe with that one drunk Templar in that one bar?  Oh, no, I'm telling it wrong. So a few months ago there was this one confiscated shipment of pitfighter nugs -- and anyway we're all banned for life now from Starkhaven local space -- " 

 _"Long story,"_ was all Aveline had to say, her voice hard and flat and not inviting further question. She pushed her way out of the docking tube, her heavily muscled shoulder brushing him aside easily in the low gravity, and he spun to watch her make her way out of the dock with his eyebrows climbing steadily up his forehead. 

Apparently, he wasn't the only one with a recent adventure to retell.

 

* * *

 

 

Isabela claimed an hour for her crew to freshen up first, to wash the recycled water out of their hair (with water just as recycled, but from a much larger pool) before they met at Varric's suite; in the meantime his lovers found him there, standing in front of a window on the planetside that overlooked Kirkwall. The light here was strong enough to wash out the stars from the background, and the space behind the planet was echoingly empty. 

They came up on either side of him, without words leaning in to bracket him, enfold him. Hawke sighed, letting his forehead drop against the arm braced against the window, as Anders raised a hand to massage the back of his neck. 

"Are you all right?" Anders murmured; Hawke met the reflection of his eyes in the window.

He summoned a smile, if an unfeeling one. "I suppose there's not much point lying to a telepath," he muttered.

Fenris gave a soft snort. "Indeed not," he said.

"There'd be no point even if I weren't an esper. We know you too well, love," Anders said. "And you've been..." He groped for a word. "…changed, recently."

Hawke frowned. "Changed? How?"

"Shorter-tempered. Less playful." Anders gave a little shrug. "More... direct."

"More focused," Fenris added.

Hawke let out a long sigh. "I'm sorry. I haven't been the best boyfriend lately, I know. Seeing what we've seen, knowing what we know..."

"You misunderstand," Fenris interrupted. "It's not that we have objections."

Hawke blinked in surprise, then turned away from the window to look directly at his lovers. 

"Believe me," Fenris said emphatically. "You aren't the only one to have nightmares after seeing… _that_. Your drive, your passion to avert that future is… more than heartening."

"Honestly, it's kinda hot," Anders added. "This new, aggressive, go-get-em' Hawke --"

Fenris gave Anders a look that spoke eloquent volumes of disgust. " _Really_ , Anders?"  
"Sorry." Anders cleared his throat, sobering up. "Anyway, the point isn't to try to force you to stop what you're doing, or to guilt-trip you. It's just... we want you to know that we're here for you. We'll support you, whatever you need to do." 

"Yes," Fenris nodded, for a rare occasion in full agreement with his lover. "Where you lead, we will follow."

"I..." Hawke swallowed hard against the lump that threatened his throat. His shoulders sagged, even as the weight on them seemed lessened. "Thank you." 

For a little while longer they just stood there, Hawke with his back pressed against the window, Anders and Fenris held tight in his arms. All of them holding fiercely on to each other.

 

* * *

 

 

 

They all gathered together in Varric's quarters later that evening: Hawke, Fenris and Anders from the _Lady Amell;_  Isabela, Merrill and apparently Aveline from the _Siren's Fury;_ and Varric as the local host, providing food and wine. There was a great deal of chatter over dinner, catching up on news and local gossip, but the crew of _Lady Amell_ \-- and especially Hawke -- were more subdued and quiet, knowing what was still to come. 

"All right," Aveline said, taking charge over the remains of scattered food packets and wine glasses -- actual full-gravity wine glasses, their fragile glass and open mouths totally unsuitable to any kind of ship's life. "What's this all about, Hawke? You said that you'd discovered something so momentous that it could completely change life in this part of the galaxy, and that you needed -- and I checked, you did use the word _need --_   us to be a part of it." 

Hawke nodded, standing up and moving over to Varric's holotank. He took a deep breath; even though he had rehearsed what he was going to say, and what he was going to show, it was still nerve-wracking to know how much was riding on this. "Right," he said. "Okay, so this has to do with what we found on the derelict Varric tipped us onto over in the Serpent Nebula -- the _Herald of Andraste_. It's opened up some… unexpected avenues, that I need some help in exploring." 

"Is there profit involved?" Isabela called out, leaning back on the divan with a glass of wine in hand and Merrill in the other. 

Hawke held out a hand in balance, tipped it this way and that. "It might be better to think of it as an exercise in minimizing loss." 

"Loss of what?" Merrill piped up. 

Hawke grimaced. "Everything." 

There was a short silence, which Isabela broke with an uneasy chuckle. "You're beginning to creep me out a little bit, Hawke. This isn't like you." 

"I'm afraid there's more to come," Hawke said. "All right. To start with, this was the last image that the visuals on the _Herald_ captured before it died." 

He keyed up the static image in Varric's holotank, and the battlefield sprang into life against the eldritch glow of the Breach behind it. It was a little dim, being an extract from their helmet cams rather than from the ship itself, but it was clear enough. Startled oaths and murmurs ran around the wardroom, and he couldn't help a sour grimace of satisfaction. At least he wasn't the only one with such a visceral reaction. 

"Maker, what _is_   that?" Aveline exclaimed. "Is that some kind of… of nebula? It can't be a black hole, not at that distance…" 

"The crew of the _Herald_   called it 'the Breach,' " Anders put in, thankfully skipping over the complicating factor of Cole. They were going to unload enough whoppers on their audience without asking them to accept an artificial intelligence as well. "It's a flaw -- or rather, an incursion -- in the fabric of the universe itself." 

Anders turned his head so that his next words were directed directly towards Merrill. "In other words, it's a direct _physical_   access port directly into the Fade." 

"Oh." Merrill brought her hands up to her lips, her eyes wide and horrified. "Oh. Oh Creators, no. But if it's an open access port, then what's to stop the ones on the other side from coming through?" 

"Nothing at all," Anders said grimly. "That's the problem." 

Merrill breathed a phrase in Elvhen that sounded like a whimper. "Excuse me," Isabela interrupted, her voice edged with unease. "Can you explain this for those of us in the audience who aren't espers, just why this is a bad thing?" 

Anders took over, and Hawke let him. "Okay, try to imagine the stuff that makes up the basis of the universe," he said. "People use a variety of metaphors to help you visualize it -- a grid, a matrix, a heavy cloth on a table, that sort of thing. Phenomenon like gravity is explained when a mass makes a 'dent' in the fabric, so light and other matter roll towards it. With me so far?" 

"I think so," Isabela said after a moment, and Aveline nodded cautiously. 

"Well, _someone,"_   Anders said, and made a swift downwards stabbing motion like he held a dagger in his fist, " _punched_   a hole in that fabric, and now everything's falling through to the other side. And I don't just mean light and other objects, I mean literally _everything._   Not just the things on the tablecloth, but the fabric of the tablecloth itself is actually being pulled through the hole. And as it goes through, everything else on the tablecloth gets dragged forwards too." 

" _Creadore,"_   Isabela muttered. 

"And in the meanwhile," Fenris added, stepping over to the holo to trace along one of the lines of colorless, formless shapes streaking from the Breach. "The life-forms on the other side of the hole are less than pleased with this incursion into their space, and are taking offense rather violently." 

Aveline shook her head, aghast. Merrill removed her hands from her mouth to say, "But this is terrible! Why haven't we heard anything about a catastrophe on this scale? We haven't been out of contact for that long…" 

"You haven't heard of it because it hasn't happened yet," Hawke said. 

The silence Hawke dreaded filled the room. At least they'd accepted the news of the Breach readily enough, but this was going to be harder to swallow. "Say again?" Isabela said finally. "Is this some kind of --" 

"Joke?" Varric finished for her. His face was grim. "Believe me, Rivaini, I wish it were. But it's for real. It's all for real. Trust me on this." 

Aveline shook her head. Isabela pursed her lips. Merrill, at least, looked like she was already on her way to being convinced. "But… how?" she asked, wide eyes reflecting the light of the holotank. 

Instead of trying to explain directly, Hawke held up the diary he'd taken from the Captain's chair. "This is the personal diary of the ship's captain and squadron commander, Commodore Ameridan," he said. He connected it to Varric's computers, and though the visual didn't change, the Captain's rich, deep voice filled the room. 

" _Local ship's time, twenty-three hundred,"_ the faceless voice began. " _Solis fourteenth, eighty-four forty FA. Today's courier delivered_ \-- " 

Merrill made a little surprised sound, and Hawke paused the playback to look over at her. "Merrill?" 

The dark-haired woman's eyes were wide with shock. "That's the old Elvhen calendar he's using," she exclaimed. "Dating from the founding or Arlathan, over eight thousand years ago. Only the Dalish use that calendar any more, but --" 

"Ameridan was Dalish," Fenris said. "At least, as far as we were able to tell. What a Dalish elf was doing --" 

"No, but that's not it," Merrill interrupted. "He said, eighty-four forty, but it's only eighty-four thirty now. Eighty-four forty would be --" 

"Ten years in the future," Hawke finished for her. "That's right." 

After giving the others another moment to digest this, but before any of them could start another objection, he turned the recording back on. 

" _\-- courier delivered the final estimates for the squadron which the flagship, 'Herald of Andraste,' will be commanding,"_ Ameridan's voice continued.  " _I find myself of two minds about the timing on this announcement. I suppose I must remind myself that for any significant military force to assemble takes time, and the more so for an organization as young and yet untested as this Inquisition. From that perspective, it is a marvel that Cullen managed to come up with so many combat-worthy ships, so nearby, on such a short notice -- even if no task force of the People would be caught dead dragging their heels in such a manner._

_"However, this is by no means a normal situation. This is no normal military engagement. Time and the Breach wait for no man, and with every day that drags by further, more damage is done. When the Breach reaches our doors, we must be ready, willing or not, and it spreads at a pace which frightens me to my bones. Is it only an illusion, a phantom pain, that I can hear the soul of space crying out in torment even from this distance? If the Keeper's legends are true, then perhaps not."_

"Oh," Merrill breathed, and blinked back tears.

_"How strange it feels: as I look out the viewport from where I sit I can see the breach, like a dim sun on the horizon. When first I arrived at Haven station, it was visible only as a bright star. How could anything possibly have grown so quickly? According to the scientists this is entirely the wrong question: it is not that the Breach has grown in size, they say, but that it has closed the distance. Of the fifteen parsecs distant that it was when first I came, it now is only nine._

_"What of the rest of the distance, the empty space that once separated that span? It is gone; it is no more. It has been swallowed, just like Haven, just like Redcliffe, just like Kirkwall,  just like Halamshiral, just like a hundred smaller star systems with no name and no human presence, whose secrets and histories will go forever unnamed and unmourned."_

Hawke was watching Varric when the name 'Kirkwall' was dropped; Varric had heard this once before, but he still couldn't manage to pull a poker face over the pain that wracked his expression. Looking at that twist of grief, of darkly buried anger, Hawke for the first time had no trouble at all believing that if his home really were lost to this menace, then Varric would go to war. 

The tape ran out; Hawke keyed up the next one. 

 _"Local ship's time, ten-hundred. Solis twenty-eight_ ," the Commander's voice began. _"The construction of the Anchor is nearly complete. They have begun the process of transferring it to the mobile platform -- or should I say, constructing the platform around it -- in order to transport it to the site of the Breach. There, it will be up to us to guard it while it does… whatever it is that it is meant to do._

_"Part of me is uneasy that I do not understand the specifics of what this machine is meant to accomplish; if I do not know how it works, I cannot anticipate what will go wrong, and I cannot make contingency plans. But I would be dishonest if I did not admit that the mechanics of the device are far above my scientific understanding. At least I can comfort myself in knowing that in this I am not alone; of all the thousands the Inquisition has gathered here, I think there are less than thirty with a full understanding of how it works._

_"Doctor Solas has assured me that the Anchor will put an end to the bleeding of space-time through the Breach, stop its unchecked expansion. He was a bit more guarded on whether they would actually be able to seal the Breach fully at the same time, but there can be no question that stopping it is the most urgent priority. Dorian assured me of the same, though at much greater length and with a great deal more chatter and frivolity around the edges. Perhaps it is beyond me to understand what the Anchor will do, but this I know: I trust these men, trust in their expertise and in the craftsmanship of the machine they have helped to build._

_"And in the end, my understanding does not truly matter. Perhaps even my contingency planning will not matter. The Anchor must work. It must work, and on the first try, because I do not think we will be allowed a second."_  

The next entry didn't quite go in order with the first; it was dated considerably earlier, but Hawke thought it was important nonetheless. It was the closest he ever came to explicitly discussing why he had joined the Inquisition, or who made up its leadership, or even what exactly this mysterious organization was. 

 _"Ship's time, twenty-hundred thirty, Solis second. Ambassador Montilyet asked me today if I had encountered many problems with ship's discipline, or expected any problems with the other ship's captains under my command,"_ Ameridan said. His voice had a wry tone to it, absent from most of the other, more serious entries _. "Ever the diplomat, Josephine was too polite to come out and say what she meant: that I might expect problems with being an **elf**   placed in command over a squadron -- a Dalish elf, to boot._

_"There have been some strains, it is true -- but nothing nearly on the level that I had expected, stepping into an Andrastean-controlled fleet to take a position of command. I was prepared to face it down where I could, endure where I could not, but in truth I have received much less hostility or insult than I had expected. I do believe I have gotten more grief from Sera for being 'too elfy' than from any of the human members of our crew._

_"Perhaps the others who make up the Inquisition are as conscious as I am of the stakes that ride on our success or failure -- or perhaps the presence of so many other outsiders helps diffuse the tensions. Certainly the Inquisition has made sincere efforts to outreach to every possible group that can and wants to help -- from an outlaw of the Red Jennies to a Tal-Vashoth mercenary captain to a battered old Dalish pirate like myself._

_"Their leadership takes great pains to assure all comers that it is **not**   simply another branch of the Council of Song, however much it looks like one.  I find the Inquisition's desire to distance themselves from their progenitor understandable, if a trifle disingenuous: after all, it was the Council in their avarice and greed who broke the sky."_ 

 _"What?"_   Aveline shouted, disbelief lacing her voice. "No! How is that possible? The Council would never…" 

"I have to say," Isabela said, a shaky veneer of false-casual over a deeply troubled voice. "That does sound more like something the Consortium would pull, doesn't it?" 

"That's what _I_   said," Fenris growled. "And yet, it is so." 

Aveline shook her head. "I can't believe the Council of all people would mess around with holes to the Fade," she exclaimed. "Why would they do such a thing?" 

"Why?" Anders replied, standing up. "Because they lost their fleet of slave pilots to the esper rebellion, that's why." In the background, Fenris rolled his eyes heavenwards, but Anders either didn't see or ignored the gesture. "But they still needed to get from Point A to Point B in a hurry in order to maintain their precious empire. And because, apparently unlike the Consortium, they didn't _know better."_  

"Rebellion? _What_ esper rebellion?" Aveline demanded. 

"Just listen," Hawke said. "It's almost over." 

They quieted, and he played the last entry. 

Ameridan's voice in this entry was more strained, rough with a barely-contained frustration and agitation. No timestamp was appended to this entry, instead jumping right into his diatribe. _"Sister Nightingale reports that the Inquisition's attempts to bring the rebels back into the fold have met with failure,"_ he said. _"She had almost won their trust -- **almost** \-- before the ship carrying their envoys back to the traveling Circle was ambushed by a pair of destroyers, crewed by rogue Templars._  

_"The Inquisition had nothing to do with the attack, of course, but that hardly matters now. With their ships destroyed, the espers retreated, and apparently the Templars followed them. Scattered reports from the Arcturus Hinterlands indicate that the espers and Templars have fallen to fighting there, re-enacting old grudges and fanatic idealism while the universe itself falls apart around them._

  _"Damn this war and damn the ones who started it! The breach would not even exist if not for the espers' ill-timed bid for freedom. If they had not deprived the Andrastean Federation of three-quarters of their Fade-capable ship capacity overnight, then those reckless fools on the Council would not have made such an idiotic, short-sighted, arrogant attempt to shortcut their way across space in the first place!_

 _"Now the rabble of Council survivors hole up in their dawnstone-encrusted floating palace at Val Royeaux -- as though armor will do any good at all against the Breach -- and argue over who will be the next Divine, while their wayward protégés snipe at each other in the backwoods of the galaxy instead of helping us to clean up their messes. Damn them all!"_  

Here the recording broke off into incoherent, foul-tempered cursing. Hawke suspected the words were in Elvhen, as he could not make out most of them but Merrill's ears twitched repeatedly and she couldn't hold back a small squeak. 

 _"Despite this setback, Operation Skyhold will proceed on schedule,"_ Ameridan's voice resumed, somewhat calmer. _"Without the Andrastean espers to bolster our forces, we will rely more than ever on the Consortium psi-lords accompanying Haruspex Erimond. We will have to deploy the Venatori much more extensively in our own formations than originally planned. Allying ourselves with the tyrants who nearly destroyed my people in the past and continue to enslave our cousins to this day is… would not be my first preference, but at least they seem to understand the dire reality of the threat that dooms us all, and they do say that chaos makes strange bedfellows._

_"We leave tonight. We must make do with what forces we have; there is no more time to stop and wait for our ships to muster. The fleet will travel with the Anchor to the very fringe of the demon-infested areas near the Breach, and there it will be our job to defend the platform while it does its work._

_"I pray the creators will smile upon our efforts; surely they cannot stand by and watch all Their works perish? Ghilan'nain, Halla-mother, and Andraste, Maker-bride, watch over me and my men in the battle to come. Lend us whatever aid you may, whatever you can, for the task before us is vast, and we cannot fail. We dare not fail."_

 

* * *

 

 

The panicked screams and cacaphony of the _Herald of Andraste's_   last few moments dissolved into static, then abruptly cut into silence as the recording reached its end. Hawke reached over and turned off the audio; the rest of his audience sat stone-still, shocked by the violent specter of sudden death. They were all spacers; they'd all come a hairsbreadth close to such deaths in their time. They all knew what the sudden cessation of sound meant. 

"After the betrayal," Hawke said quietly, picking up the end of the thread as it spun out in the silence, "the damaged ship tumbled into the Breach itself, but it still had enough computing power for its nav program to function. Somehow the ship found its way through and out the other side -- but by then, everyone onboard was dead. 

"That's all we know. That last recording is the last one we have. We don't know what happened on the other side of the Breach after their flagship was shot out of the sky -- whether they managed to rally against the traitors on one side and the demons on the other -- but somehow, I'm not willing to put money on it." 

Merrill was weeping, clutching Isabela's hands. Aveline was so pale that her freckles stood out on her skin like spatters of blood; he hadn't seen her look so shocky since the pressurization accident. Varric, Anders and Fenris had all seen it before, but they looked no less daunted. 

"So there you have it, pirates and gentlemen," Hawke said, putting his hands on the edges of the table and leaning forward across it. "A deadline. Ten years until the end of the universe. All of us in this room here are the only ones in the galaxy who know, and no government will ever believe us. The question is: what are we going to do about it?" 

The question hung in the air before him, and Hawke made no move to answer it right away. He did have some ideas, but he didn't feel confident of them -- not confident enough to bet against the end of the universe, anyway. He wanted to see if the others could come up with something before being influenced by his own ideas. 

Unsurprisingly, Aveline was the first to stir, gamely stepping up to take charge as always. "Well, this Ameridan has already pretty much told us himself how it could be stopped, didn't he?" she said. "This all started with the esper rebellion. Now that we know it's going to happen, can't we stop it before we begin?" 

From the side couch Fenris muttered, "That's what _I_ said." It was almost drowned out, however, by the cry Anders let off at almost the same time. 

"No!" Anders rose out of his chair like a shot. "Do you have any idea _at all_ how long the espers have waited for their freedom? How much injustice they have endured? Now they finally -- finally -- take the steps to free themselves, and you want to shove them back into that pit?" 

"There are billions of innocent lives at stake, Anders -- not just a few thousand espers!" Aveline snapped back. "Can you honestly be so selfish as to think that the 'freedom' of a handful of people is worth more the fate of the _entire universe?"_  

"I think that it's not the job of the espers to suffer in bondage indefinitely so that other people don't have to face the consequences of their own mistakes!" Anders flared back. "Remember, it was the _Council_  that actually ripped open the Breach! It was the _Council_   who got it into their heads to play Maker! If we really want to stop the Breach from happening, why don't we get a nuke or two and go get rid of the Council?" 

 _"What?"_ Aveline had a powerful voice, suitable for a parade ground -- it filled and overflowed the small space. "Are you crazy? You can't -- you can't just murder the entire _Council of Song_ \-- the heads of state for the entire Andrastean Federation, the religious leaders of half the _galaxy!"_  

"Why not? This is their doing, not ours! If we're going to punish people, shouldn't we make sure it's the guilty ones who are being punished?" His voice took on a savage, mocking tone. "Or can you honestly be so selfish as to think that a handful of people are worth more than the fate of the entire universe?" 

"I _think,"_   Aveline said, an ominous iron clang in her voice, "that if I hear you making terroristic threats one more time --" 

"Enough!" Hawke interrupted, pushing forward to break the tension of the tableau. This was getting out of hand. When Anders bickered with Fenris, even if Hawke didn't mediate he could be pretty sure that they would never actually physically attack each other. With Anders and Aveline, there was no such guarantee. Aveline had never shied away from using physical force to emphasize her points, and Anders… Anders wasn't letting rationality and prudence rule his brain right now. 

In the week since they'd left the _Herald,_   while Fenris had combed through the ship's databanks and Hawke had slowly memorized every word of Ameridan's diary, Anders had been most interested in the tantalizing reports of the esper rebellion. More than interested, if Hawke was being honest with himself; more like obsessed. 

They had only sketchy data on the rebellion, the primary sources being more preoccupied with the threat of the Breach than with the events that had led up to it. But there was enough, and Anders had spent long hours in the night-shift poring over every last word and detail. The accounts of Fiona, the elvhen Clairvoyant who had struck the first spark, led a wave of protests and votes against Council domination of the Circles. The unbelievable, daring tale of the rebellion itself -- how somehow, despite all the oversight and surveillance, the ringleaders of the Rebellion had managed to rig up the Circle _itself_   with a lyriad drive; the epochal day when, under the Templars' very noses, the Circle and every esper aboard it had Fade-stepped their way to freedom. 

Anders had always yearned for freedom for his people, Hawke knew; always wished, but never truly believed it could happen. Now that he knew that it could -- that it _would_  -- that somewhere, sometime, it _had…_   it had lit a new fire in him. 

But this was neither the time nor place. Hawke stepped between Anders and Aveline, "Sit down, both of you," he said roughly, leveling a stern stare at his lover, then a longer, challenging stare at Aveline. "Like Fenris said, we _have_   already discussed this possibility. It's not going to work, and here's why. 

"To put it plainly, we don't know enough about the events that led up to the Breach to try to mess around with him," Hawke said, turning back to the holotank and its static vision of destruction. "The sketchy outline we got from Ameridan's diary is about all we have, and it's short in any kind of details -- who, what, where, or when. For all we know, he's exaggerating or venting -- this was only ever meant to be a private diary, not a peer-reviewed publication. It just doesn't give us enough information to form a clear and effective plan of action. 

"Suppose we _do_  act on the news of the esper rebellion -- say, we take our suspicions to the Templars, saying we have reason to believe that an insurrection is brewing. In response the Templars crack down, and the worsening conditions provide the spark for a rebellion that wouldn't have otherwise happened?" 

He swung around to frown forbiddingly at Anders. "And likewise suppose we _did_ take a nuke and blow up the Council -- though Maker knows how we'd even get a chance to do that -- and it just got convened with a new board of more radical members who would push forward on the Breach?" He let the daunting possibility hang in the air for a moment, then shook his head. "There's no way we'd be able to keep control of the consequences -- or even predict them. We've never had a precedent of time travel to work with, before -- for all we know the timestream is self-healing, and any action we take will just push the events along their original path." 

Slowly, Aveline sank back into her seat. Anders stood for a moment with his hands still clenched, then abruptly dropped back onto the couch; Hawke could see even from here that he was trembling. 

Merrill spoke up. "Then what _can_   we do?" 

"Recruit more help." Hawke glanced over at his other lover, who had carefully stayed out of the moment of drama. Fenris nodded at him, then got up to call up a new file on the holo, momentarily blotting out the vision of the Breach. 

"We have managed to identify a number of the individuals who were present on the Herald at the time of its destruction," Fenris said. A grid flickered onscreen, several rows of portraits (some badly pixilated) with a few lines of text accompanying each. "The crew file information was very corrupted, but these are the ones we've managed to recover." 

"Toss that file over here, would you Fen?" Isabela asked, and Fenris sent it to her reader with an obliging tap. Merrill and Isabela bent together over the file, while Aveline stared at the list on the main screen as though she could burn a hole in it with her gaze. 

"Several of these people were also mentioned in Ameridan's diary as close confidants," Hawke said. "Including Ameridan himself, these are ten people that we _know,_ with absolute certainty, will be in the right place at the right time to make a difference. With them on our side, we might be able to change the future." 

Aveline frowned. "So you want to… track down these people?" she said slowly. "One by one? And you think _that_  is the best way to save the universe?" 

"It's the best idea I've got," Hawke replied. He glanced around the room. "Unless any of you have a better one?" 

Silence. 

"Well," Varric said, breaking the tense moment, "shit, not like I had anything better to do. We've got ten years, right? We can at least give it a try, and maybe we'll turn up something even better along the way." 

Hawke sat back, relieved. "So we just need to find these people. Unfortunately, most of them aren't in the public records. I was hoping you could find me some leads." 

"Some of them are more public than others," Varric remarked. He held up the bio of a woman with dark curls, a strong nose and elegant earrings. "This Ambassador that the Commander mentions a few times -- Josephine Montilyet. The Montilyets are a big name in Anvita. If she really is in the Antivan ambassador corps -- even if she's still a junior there -- I think I can find a way to get in touch with her." 

"Here's one that shouldn't be too hard," Anders chipped in. He gestured at the stocky man with the dark beard. "This Gordon Blackwall fellow is a fairly senior Specialist of the Grey. I'm sure I can get hold of him, even if I have to go back to the nearest Specialist outpost to do it." 

"What about this Circle pilot?" Hawke tapped the portrait of the elegant, dark-haired woman on the screen; it helped to see a picture of her as she had been alive, before the vacuum had twisted the life out of her. Even more to know that she _was_   still alive, and out there somewhere. "Professora du Fer?" According to Cole, she had been the architect of an entirely new kind of weapon, one which could destroy the demons corporeally; he would very much like to have her on their side. 

Anders' face screwed up in a grimace. "What, you think anyone in the Circle will listen to anything _I_   have to say? I'm an ungrateful apostate runaway, remember? Also, pretty sure there's a warrant out for my immediate arrest. If it doesn't specify 'shoot on sight,' that is." 

"No one promised this would be easy, Blondie," Varric said wryly. 

"Oh, fine," Anders said, giving a highly aggravated sigh. "I've got -- a few channels. Discreet channels. I can at least _ask._   But I can't guarantee that she'll talk to me." 

"You said that Commander Ameridan was Dalish?" Merrill piped up, studying the portraits with interest. Her slender finger lighted on the dark-skinned elf with the dreadlocks. "And this other elf, Solas?" 

"Ameridan was for sure," Hawke answered. "Solas is a bit more of a mystery. His bio has almost no information, and we could find nothing on his name in the records." 

"If he really is Dalish, that's no wonder," Merrill said, and smiled. "We Dalish don't tend to make our names and locations public in the Andrastean datasphere. But maybe I can ask among the clans." 

Hawke nodded; that was exactly the connection he'd been hoping for, and the main reason he'd contacted Isabela. The pirate herself spoke up next. 

"As it happens, I've worked with the Jennies from time to time," she said oh-so-casually, prompting a snort from Aveline. "I can put out a lure for this Sera, see if anything bites. But I'm even more interested in the mention of this Sister Nightingale." 

"That means something to you?" Hawke asked. 

Isabela nodded. " _If_   it's the same woman," she said, "then I know her as a… friend of a friend from Denerim. We met one enchanting evening at the Pearl, and the three of us had a wonderfully delicious --" 

"Whoa there, Rivaini, keep it PG for the audience," Varric joked, and Isabela grinned. 

"-- _friendship,"_ she finished with a purr. "Anyway, the rumors say she went to be even more infamous among the Chantry underworld since then. So it _might_   be the same woman. If so, I can ask my… _friend_   to put us in touch." 

"There's a Chantry underworld?" Merrill said, sounding surprised. "I never knew that. I always thought they were too busy being, oh, straight-laced and virtuous for that." 

"Oh, you'd be surprised," Isabela said. "It's more cut-throat than any smuggler's port in the Free Marches. Religious zeal does that to people." 

"Well, while you're off cavorting with spies and whores -- or should I say, _other_   whores --" Aveline said acerbically; Isabela just smirked. "I've worked with the Federation Marines before. I was stationed with Cullen at Starkhaven for a period of a few months, and I'm fairly sure I've seen this Major Pentaghast before. I'll see if I can look them up. Once they know what's at stake, I'm certain they'd lend their aid." 

"How about this pretty Pavus boy?" Isabela asked. "Ameridan implied that he helped develop the Anchor, so he'd be especially useful to have on our side. Fenris? Do you know the name, know how we could hit him up?" 

Hawke glanced over at Fenris. The Tevinter elf frowned stormily, not meeting Hawke's eyes. Fortunately, Varric intervened. "If he really is a psilord, he won't be too hard to find,"  the dwarf said easily. "I'll put my contacts on it, same as for Lady Montilyet." 

Fenris cleared his throat. "As it so happens, I still retain some contacts among the Fog Warriors," he said. "They keep a close eye on the various unattached Qunari, and are bound to know of any mercenary companies headed by Tal-Vashoth. We can look there for news of this Iron Bull." 

Varric nodded. "That sounds like a good start," he said. "We've each got our targets. Now, while on one hand we're going to be chasing leads all over the galaxy, I don't think it's a good idea for any us to go haring off on our own. It's still a dangerous galaxy out there, after all. We'll start by dividing our targets up by region…" 

Hawke sank back onto the couch between Anders and Hawke, listening to Varric plan. The voices of his other friends rose and fell in murmurs and objections, sketching out the beginnings of a path into the future. 

Fenris brushed a hand against his arm, and Hawke reached out and took his hand; took Anders' hand in his own, as well. In the dark he couldn't see either of their hands twined with his, but he could feel them, their strength supporting his. 

They were on their way. They'd gotten started, and while the path ahead of them might be difficult, and might be shadowed, at least they had hope. Hope that the future could be changed, that the disaster that threatened could be averted. No matter how bad the odds were, he didn't feel so frightened, knowing that they would face them together. 

The espers were right, Hawke reflected, as he listened to the others talk casually about making contact with people millions of light-years away. Distance was an illusion; space was no barrier. They were all connected, memory to memory, voice to voice, soul to soul. They were all connected, and none of them were alone.  

 

* * *

 

 

~the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's DONE!! Whew. Sorry to make you all wait so long; can you believe I originally thought I could get this fic done before the end of October? Hah. No. Even aside from the fact that I got extremely sick in December, which didn't help, this fic has fought me every step of the way. I don't know why, honestly, no individual element has been that difficult to pin down -- but it's been a real bear.
> 
> Still in all, I'm glad I wrote it, and I'm glad that you all have stuck with me for the ride!


End file.
